In 2002 Bill Simmons wrote one of his most famous columns, The 13 Levels of Losing, updating it five years later with 3 more categories (one for my 2007 Mets. Ug.) The incredible, devastating, painful, shocking, humiliating, debilitating, mind-numbing, gut-wrenching, soul-destroying loss – no, loss is too weak a word - murder suffered by the New York Giants this past Sunday doesn’t quite fit one of the 16 categories perfectly. It matched eight of them.
XV. Achilles Heel: A fatal flaw is revealed (we knew special teams would cost us eventually)
XIV. Alpha Dog: A stud on the other team is too much (the Mutt-Murderer)
XIII. Rabbit’s Foot: Where seemingly everything goes wrong (let's not relive those 8 minutes)
XII. Sudden Death (no, it wasn’t overtime, but the clock showing zero as DeSean Jackson proved he’s the league’s next wide receiver ASSH0LE* made it feel like it)
XI. Monkey Wrench: Your coach makes an idiot decision (TMQB breaks down Coughlin/Fewell's Quartus Horribilis)
VI. Broken Axle: Where the wheels come off (um, yeah)
IV. The Guillotine: Where even the fan feels like he contributed to the karmic evil (I confess I started thinking through the playoff scenarios with Giants as a 2 seed)
III. Stomach Punch: Where the opponent makes an improbable play and/or your guy screws up (see above, multiple times)
* I don’t usually curse here at FreeTime, but DeSean Jackson – who has clearly learned from TO, Randy Moss, Ochocinco, and other members of today’s wide receiving prima donna community, cannot be described with a lesser word. How is that one position attracts so many individuals so badly in need of a beating?
Yes, the Giants collapse against the Eagles used up 8 of the 16 levels of losing! But you know that here at FreeTime we traffic in Optimism. We’re all about the silver lining, our cup is half full, we look on the bright side, we turn lemons into lemonade – yes, we’re delusional as Martini in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest!
So I’m going to ask my Giant fan friends to take a step off the ledge…yes that’s it, open the window, yes, c’mon back in the room. Okay, finger off the trigger, put the gun down. Okay? Listen to me. This loss was many horrible things, it contained 8 of the 16 levels of losing all wrapped up in one giant fetid steaming smelly pile of elephant dung. Bu here’s what it wasn’t:
A Level I Loss: That Game
A Level IX Loss: The Full-Fledged Butt Kicking
“That Game” is Simmons’ name for Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. And “The Full-Fledged Butt Kicking” – well you can figure out what that is. (Interestingly, the example he uses for this is the New York Giants 41-0 beatdown of the Minnesota Vikings in the 2001 NFC Championship Game. )
It’s important to remember this is not a Level I loss because Level I losses end seasons. The Giants 39-38 playoff collapse to the Niners in 2003 – a game in which they led by 24 in the third quarter - was a Level I loss. The 23-22 playoff loss to the Vikings in 1997 when the onside kick bounced off Chris Calloway’s chest and the Vikes scored 10 points in the final minute was a Level I loss. They had all the horror of Sunday’s game but no chance at redemption.
Nor was it a Level IX loss. The NFL had a wonderful example of a Full-Fledged Butt-Kicking recently – the Patriots’ 45-3 humiliation of the Jets. When the most common phrase said about your team the following week is “exposed as a fraud”, that’s a tough loss.
But the Giants did not get their butts kicked Sunday. And they did not end their season Sunday. Indeed, they remain well-positioned for a playoff spot.
So as you look for some scrap of optimism to hold onto, think about it this way: if you asked Tom Brady and the Patriots if they would like to face the Jets in the playoffs, that locker room would erupt in cheers. But if you asked Michael Vick to answer in complete honesty whether or not he wants to face the Giants again – indeed, whether he ever wants to be in the same room as Justin Tuck again – I suspect he’d answer like Apollo Creed at the end of Rocky: “Ain’t gonna be no rematch.”
As for redemption…I think we all know what that looks like. A six seed for the Giants, followed by a victory against the Bears in the playoffs, followed by a trip to Philadelphia in the 2nd round.
In these days of sensitivity around football injuries I’ll say what I know all Giants fans are feeling: no matter what happens after that, that loss will be expunged if the Canine Killer and TO's Spawn leave the field on stretchers - not seriously hurt, mind you; just a little shaken up - and the Giants leave it in victory.
Oh, and as for the title of this post...Finnegan is my dog's name. He hates Michael Vick.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Misunderestimation
The reputations of historical figures are not static things; sometimes they rise and fall, long after that person has exited the world stage.
Thomas Jefferson was revered for a century and a half after his death – he was considered the most brilliant of the Founders, an ideal for all Americans to live by. In 1962, John Kennedy, addressing a roomful of Nobel Prize winners in the White House, said that “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
But in the past twenty years his stock has taken a beating. Numerous scholarly and popular works of history have compared Jefferson’s contribution in the American Revolution to that of John Adams, and found that perhaps the Sage of Monticello had received too much credit and the Duke of Braintree too little. More devastatingly, the DNA test showing Jefferson did in fact impregnate his slave Sally Hemings was a blow from which his historical reputation may never fully recover.
Harry Truman, on the other hand, has seen his reputation soar. Truman left office in 1953 with staggeringly low approval ratings - his low of 22% "beats" the lowest of Nixon (24%) and Bush (25%). He was seen as something of a folksy bumbler, a nice enough man in over his head. But now, he is widely considered to have been the ideal steward of America’s foreign policy in a post-war world. The twin achievements of the Marshall Plan and NATO helped ease in a half century of (mostly) peace and prosperity. In polls of Presidential historians, Truman ranks as high as fifth, behind Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts.
(The historian David McCullough played a prominent role in both of these shifting reputations, through his biographies of Truman and Adams. He’s the E.F. Hutton of American historians.)
I bring all this up because George W. Bush has returned to our lives. The publication of his memoirs, the continuing measured success in Iraq, and the troubles of his successor has some wondering: can George W. Bush enjoy a Trumanesque revival?
It’s too early to tell, of course, and regular readers of this space know I am loath to make predictions. But I can, perhaps, give you a hint of what conditions will be necessary for a latter-day McCullough, writing in the year 2053, to write a book that will revive Bush’s reputation.
For that hint, we’ll turn to another President – one whose reputation as a great American has held steady: Dwight Eisenhower. In 1946 General Eisenhower was in command of the Allied occupation of Berlin, following the end of the Second World War. Ike was asked by a reporter, how we would know if the Occupation was a success?
Eisenhower said, “The success of this occupation can only be judged fifty years from now. If the Germans at that time have a stable, prosperous democracy, than we shall have succeeded.”
West Germany, of course, was a stable and prosperous democracy within 25 years. In 1990, West and East Germany reunified. By 1996 – fifty years after Eisenhower’s statement, Germany was indisputably a stable and prosperous democracy.
In the early days of the Iraq War, there is no question that the Bush Administration declared Mission: Accomplished too soon. But in the darkest days of the war, around 2005, the war’s detractors claimed defeat too quickly.
Will, in fifty years, Iraq be a stable and prosperous democracy? Forty years? If that democracy is an important part of the antidote to the sickness of radical Islam that infects the Muslim world; if, indeed, the scourge of Bin Laden and terrorism ends up in history’s dustbin along with Hitler and Nazism, will Bush enjoy a Trumanesque revival?
Stay tuned. For a really long time.
Update (6/12/13): This doesn't mean much in the long run, but Dubya may have started his comeback already. According to Gallup, his approval ratings today - 4 and a 1/2 years after leaving office, are at 49%. As the article points out, former Presidents often do better after they go away a while. But worth noting...
Thomas Jefferson was revered for a century and a half after his death – he was considered the most brilliant of the Founders, an ideal for all Americans to live by. In 1962, John Kennedy, addressing a roomful of Nobel Prize winners in the White House, said that “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
But in the past twenty years his stock has taken a beating. Numerous scholarly and popular works of history have compared Jefferson’s contribution in the American Revolution to that of John Adams, and found that perhaps the Sage of Monticello had received too much credit and the Duke of Braintree too little. More devastatingly, the DNA test showing Jefferson did in fact impregnate his slave Sally Hemings was a blow from which his historical reputation may never fully recover.
Harry Truman, on the other hand, has seen his reputation soar. Truman left office in 1953 with staggeringly low approval ratings - his low of 22% "beats" the lowest of Nixon (24%) and Bush (25%). He was seen as something of a folksy bumbler, a nice enough man in over his head. But now, he is widely considered to have been the ideal steward of America’s foreign policy in a post-war world. The twin achievements of the Marshall Plan and NATO helped ease in a half century of (mostly) peace and prosperity. In polls of Presidential historians, Truman ranks as high as fifth, behind Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts.
(The historian David McCullough played a prominent role in both of these shifting reputations, through his biographies of Truman and Adams. He’s the E.F. Hutton of American historians.)
I bring all this up because George W. Bush has returned to our lives. The publication of his memoirs, the continuing measured success in Iraq, and the troubles of his successor has some wondering: can George W. Bush enjoy a Trumanesque revival?
It’s too early to tell, of course, and regular readers of this space know I am loath to make predictions. But I can, perhaps, give you a hint of what conditions will be necessary for a latter-day McCullough, writing in the year 2053, to write a book that will revive Bush’s reputation.
For that hint, we’ll turn to another President – one whose reputation as a great American has held steady: Dwight Eisenhower. In 1946 General Eisenhower was in command of the Allied occupation of Berlin, following the end of the Second World War. Ike was asked by a reporter, how we would know if the Occupation was a success?
Eisenhower said, “The success of this occupation can only be judged fifty years from now. If the Germans at that time have a stable, prosperous democracy, than we shall have succeeded.”
West Germany, of course, was a stable and prosperous democracy within 25 years. In 1990, West and East Germany reunified. By 1996 – fifty years after Eisenhower’s statement, Germany was indisputably a stable and prosperous democracy.
In the early days of the Iraq War, there is no question that the Bush Administration declared Mission: Accomplished too soon. But in the darkest days of the war, around 2005, the war’s detractors claimed defeat too quickly.
Will, in fifty years, Iraq be a stable and prosperous democracy? Forty years? If that democracy is an important part of the antidote to the sickness of radical Islam that infects the Muslim world; if, indeed, the scourge of Bin Laden and terrorism ends up in history’s dustbin along with Hitler and Nazism, will Bush enjoy a Trumanesque revival?
Stay tuned. For a really long time.
Update (6/12/13): This doesn't mean much in the long run, but Dubya may have started his comeback already. According to Gallup, his approval ratings today - 4 and a 1/2 years after leaving office, are at 49%. As the article points out, former Presidents often do better after they go away a while. But worth noting...
Friday, November 5, 2010
True Believers (and other Election Day thoughts)
In 1999 I made my first – and still only – contribution to a political candidate. I gave fifty bucks to John McCain for his first Presidential run.
McCain’s policies were not in sync with mine – very few voters get to vote for a candidate they agree with on everything – but I was truly seduced by McCain’s honesty, the Straight Talk Express and all that. After eight slippery years with the Clintons, I was kind of desperate for a politician who seemed to have genuine beliefs, and was unafraid to express them even if it hurt him politically. Further, his extraordinary personal story* told me that his integrity was hard-earned.
* Five and a half years in a POW camp. Whenever I see that number – five and a half years is 2000 days– I’m struck by how long a period a time that is, and how much daily personal suffering he endured. And I bitch and moan when my internet connection is slow.
Bill Clinton, I decided, believed in only one thing: Bill Clinton. He was a skilled politician and incredibly smart; and policy-wise I was nearly as comfortable with him as I was with McCain (Northeast Republicans are more like Southern Democrats than Southern Republicans). But I had reached the point where I needed a breather from the Clinton’s Eternal Campaign style of politics. The Clintons, I thought, would do or say just about anything for one more vote. I wanted someone who believed in his positions, not just his electability.
Well, this week’s election marks the 10th anniversary of the period of True Believers. However different George W. Bush and Barack Obama may be, these are two Presidents who believe in their mission.
Bush fervently believed in the global threat of Saddam Hussein and the transformative power of democracy and aligned his Presidency behind that belief, even as the country turned against him. Obama fervently believes in the necessity for national healthcare and the efficacy of stimulus spending and aligned the power of his Presidency behind that belief, even as the country turns against him.
(I could take this analogy a little further. Both were so convinced that invading Iraq/passing healthcare legislation was vital to the national interest that neither was above stretching the truth to ensure it happened. The interesting thing was that the supposedly inarticulate divisive Bush was infinitely more successful at persuading his political opponents and the country at large that invading Iraq was a good idea than the supposedly eloquent and post-partisan Obama has been at selling his policies. Many Democrats voted for the Iraq war resolution and large American majorities supported it, while no Republicans supported Obamacare and a majority of Americans opposed it).
The point is, this whole true believer thing isn’t really working out for us. The war in Iraq proved to be more painful and less necessary than promised. The stimulus bill was the government equivalent of throwing a trillion bucks in the fireplace. And national healthcare – we don’t know what it’s going to be exactly, but we’re pretty certain it’s not going to be what the President promised.
The problem with true believers is that they, far more than practical-minded politicians like Bill Clinton, are victims of confirmation bias. To stay with our current President a moment, the American electorate has been telling the Obama Administration for some time - since at least the stunning election of Scott Brown - that they disagree with his policies. But he won’t be persuaded. He persists in believing that we just don’t understand them, that his only failure was explaining the policies well enough to us (which is kind of ironic, given his allegedly great oratorical skills).
Makes me long for the days of cynical politicians who will do anything for a vote. Slick Willie, where are ya?
Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made
We had an interesting Election Day in my home state of New York. Democrats rolled to landslide victories in the 3 big races (Governor and both Senate seats) but Republicans took 5 House seats. Among the defeated House Democrats was John Hall, the guitarist/songwriter for the band Orleans who had two big hits in the 70’s (Dance with Me and Still the One).
For the first time in my life as a voter I left one column blank. I couldn’t vote for either Andrew Cuomo or Carl Paladino for Governor. I’ve disliked Cuomo since he made his name in politics. He’s a self-righteous screeching moralizer – a pre-scandal Spitzer but without Spitzer’s cunning intelligence. And he’s got his Dad Mario’s faux-populism without the eloquence. Paladino was worse, significantly worse, and would have been an embarrassment to the State. I wish I had the presence of mind to write in a vote for Amare Stoudamire or my dog Finnegan, but I just left it blank.
Another interesting note in New York: Harry Reid’s come-from-behind victory in Nevada was good for the Democrats but bad for New York Democrat Chuck Schumer. Schumer would’ve been Senate Majority Leader had Reid gone down in flames. If that had happened, Schumer would be omnipresent in American politics – it’s said the most dangerous place in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a camera. Chuckie is such a publicity-hound that he held a press conference a few months ago calling on Apple Computer to fix the antennae problem in the iPhone. Thank heaven for small mercies.
That’s No Salamander
Everybody knows the numbers 6 and 60 – the GOP took six Senate seats and sixty House seats. Less known is the number 680. That is the stunning number of State legislature seats the Republicans won, taking over 18 state legislatures. Close readers of FreeTime, and there are at least 3 of you, know my obsession with gerrymandering. Well, state legislatures control the re-drawing of districts, and according to the Washington Post, “When the next round of redistricting -- the decennial re-drawing of all 435 House districts -- occurs next year, Republicans will have complete control over the process in four times as many House districts as Democrats do, districts that comprise nearly half of the entire House.”
That may be the worst news of the day for Democrats.
Occasionally Right
Mind if I point out a few instances in which I was right?
After Obama's election - when many pundits were proclaiming this was the beginning of an enduring alignment in American politics - I wrote a not-so-fast piece entitled A Sea Change Election. Very few American elections are truly transformative - by my count only three in American history - and it is usually a mistake to overread the results of a single election.
Republicans would do well to remember that now.
I also wrote a couple of pieces (see here and here) arguing that the passionate faith of Obama's followers put unreasonable expectations on him, ones that would be difficult to meet. I think that proved true.
I may have been wrong about a couple things, but you'll have to find those yourself...
Jekyll & Hyde
I’m trying to imagine what the city of San Francisco was like on Tuesday. I’ve spent a lot of time in Frisco* through the years, and it is a freakishly liberal place (I say that with affection for my liberal San Francisco friends, some of whom will read this). It was a sad day for liberals, and SF’s own Nancy Pelosi lost her gavel, of course. But (speaking of freaks) Tim Lincecum and the San Francisco Giants won the World Series! That must have been a seriously bi-polar city this week.
* San Franciscans hate the nickname Frisco, and if you use it you are disdained as an outsider who doesn’t know the city’s ways. But why? It’s a cool nickname – much better than San Fran or SF, and shorter than the full San Francisco. Come on, Friscans, embrace the Frisco!
McCain’s policies were not in sync with mine – very few voters get to vote for a candidate they agree with on everything – but I was truly seduced by McCain’s honesty, the Straight Talk Express and all that. After eight slippery years with the Clintons, I was kind of desperate for a politician who seemed to have genuine beliefs, and was unafraid to express them even if it hurt him politically. Further, his extraordinary personal story* told me that his integrity was hard-earned.
* Five and a half years in a POW camp. Whenever I see that number – five and a half years is 2000 days– I’m struck by how long a period a time that is, and how much daily personal suffering he endured. And I bitch and moan when my internet connection is slow.
Bill Clinton, I decided, believed in only one thing: Bill Clinton. He was a skilled politician and incredibly smart; and policy-wise I was nearly as comfortable with him as I was with McCain (Northeast Republicans are more like Southern Democrats than Southern Republicans). But I had reached the point where I needed a breather from the Clinton’s Eternal Campaign style of politics. The Clintons, I thought, would do or say just about anything for one more vote. I wanted someone who believed in his positions, not just his electability.
Well, this week’s election marks the 10th anniversary of the period of True Believers. However different George W. Bush and Barack Obama may be, these are two Presidents who believe in their mission.
Bush fervently believed in the global threat of Saddam Hussein and the transformative power of democracy and aligned his Presidency behind that belief, even as the country turned against him. Obama fervently believes in the necessity for national healthcare and the efficacy of stimulus spending and aligned the power of his Presidency behind that belief, even as the country turns against him.
(I could take this analogy a little further. Both were so convinced that invading Iraq/passing healthcare legislation was vital to the national interest that neither was above stretching the truth to ensure it happened. The interesting thing was that the supposedly inarticulate divisive Bush was infinitely more successful at persuading his political opponents and the country at large that invading Iraq was a good idea than the supposedly eloquent and post-partisan Obama has been at selling his policies. Many Democrats voted for the Iraq war resolution and large American majorities supported it, while no Republicans supported Obamacare and a majority of Americans opposed it).
The point is, this whole true believer thing isn’t really working out for us. The war in Iraq proved to be more painful and less necessary than promised. The stimulus bill was the government equivalent of throwing a trillion bucks in the fireplace. And national healthcare – we don’t know what it’s going to be exactly, but we’re pretty certain it’s not going to be what the President promised.
The problem with true believers is that they, far more than practical-minded politicians like Bill Clinton, are victims of confirmation bias. To stay with our current President a moment, the American electorate has been telling the Obama Administration for some time - since at least the stunning election of Scott Brown - that they disagree with his policies. But he won’t be persuaded. He persists in believing that we just don’t understand them, that his only failure was explaining the policies well enough to us (which is kind of ironic, given his allegedly great oratorical skills).
Makes me long for the days of cynical politicians who will do anything for a vote. Slick Willie, where are ya?
Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made
We had an interesting Election Day in my home state of New York. Democrats rolled to landslide victories in the 3 big races (Governor and both Senate seats) but Republicans took 5 House seats. Among the defeated House Democrats was John Hall, the guitarist/songwriter for the band Orleans who had two big hits in the 70’s (Dance with Me and Still the One).
For the first time in my life as a voter I left one column blank. I couldn’t vote for either Andrew Cuomo or Carl Paladino for Governor. I’ve disliked Cuomo since he made his name in politics. He’s a self-righteous screeching moralizer – a pre-scandal Spitzer but without Spitzer’s cunning intelligence. And he’s got his Dad Mario’s faux-populism without the eloquence. Paladino was worse, significantly worse, and would have been an embarrassment to the State. I wish I had the presence of mind to write in a vote for Amare Stoudamire or my dog Finnegan, but I just left it blank.
Another interesting note in New York: Harry Reid’s come-from-behind victory in Nevada was good for the Democrats but bad for New York Democrat Chuck Schumer. Schumer would’ve been Senate Majority Leader had Reid gone down in flames. If that had happened, Schumer would be omnipresent in American politics – it’s said the most dangerous place in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a camera. Chuckie is such a publicity-hound that he held a press conference a few months ago calling on Apple Computer to fix the antennae problem in the iPhone. Thank heaven for small mercies.
That’s No Salamander
Everybody knows the numbers 6 and 60 – the GOP took six Senate seats and sixty House seats. Less known is the number 680. That is the stunning number of State legislature seats the Republicans won, taking over 18 state legislatures. Close readers of FreeTime, and there are at least 3 of you, know my obsession with gerrymandering. Well, state legislatures control the re-drawing of districts, and according to the Washington Post, “When the next round of redistricting -- the decennial re-drawing of all 435 House districts -- occurs next year, Republicans will have complete control over the process in four times as many House districts as Democrats do, districts that comprise nearly half of the entire House.”
That may be the worst news of the day for Democrats.
Occasionally Right
Mind if I point out a few instances in which I was right?
After Obama's election - when many pundits were proclaiming this was the beginning of an enduring alignment in American politics - I wrote a not-so-fast piece entitled A Sea Change Election. Very few American elections are truly transformative - by my count only three in American history - and it is usually a mistake to overread the results of a single election.
Republicans would do well to remember that now.
I also wrote a couple of pieces (see here and here) arguing that the passionate faith of Obama's followers put unreasonable expectations on him, ones that would be difficult to meet. I think that proved true.
I may have been wrong about a couple things, but you'll have to find those yourself...
Jekyll & Hyde
I’m trying to imagine what the city of San Francisco was like on Tuesday. I’ve spent a lot of time in Frisco* through the years, and it is a freakishly liberal place (I say that with affection for my liberal San Francisco friends, some of whom will read this). It was a sad day for liberals, and SF’s own Nancy Pelosi lost her gavel, of course. But (speaking of freaks) Tim Lincecum and the San Francisco Giants won the World Series! That must have been a seriously bi-polar city this week.
* San Franciscans hate the nickname Frisco, and if you use it you are disdained as an outsider who doesn’t know the city’s ways. But why? It’s a cool nickname – much better than San Fran or SF, and shorter than the full San Francisco. Come on, Friscans, embrace the Frisco!
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Do Managers Matter?
We humans are stubborn creatures. We form an opinion, grab hold of it, and over time tighten that grip until “changing your mind” becomes nearly impossible. This is true if it is something trivial, like believing defense wins NFL championships, or of life-and-death importance, like believing holistic medicine cures disease better than modern medicine.
When we receive new data about the issue, we filter it through our bias. For example, I can provide reams of data to a “defense wins championships” believer that prove a good offense is as or even more important than a good defense, but he will discard the facts that don’t support his belief, and latch onto the ones that do. “Sure, the Saints scored with more frequency than a rich nerd at a gold digger convention,” he’ll say, “but they didn’t win a championship until Gregg Williams started blitzing like Rommel.”
Cognitive scientists call this “confirmation bias” – we naturally select data that support our existing beliefs, and discard data that refute those beliefs. Think about confirmation bias, and it will change how you look at everything from the Middle East to marital spats.
I bring all this up because I’m changing my mind about a long-held belief, a belief of enormous magnitude: I’m beginning to believe baseball managers matter.
When we receive new data about the issue, we filter it through our bias. For example, I can provide reams of data to a “defense wins championships” believer that prove a good offense is as or even more important than a good defense, but he will discard the facts that don’t support his belief, and latch onto the ones that do. “Sure, the Saints scored with more frequency than a rich nerd at a gold digger convention,” he’ll say, “but they didn’t win a championship until Gregg Williams started blitzing like Rommel.”
Cognitive scientists call this “confirmation bias” – we naturally select data that support our existing beliefs, and discard data that refute those beliefs. Think about confirmation bias, and it will change how you look at everything from the Middle East to marital spats.
I bring all this up because I’m changing my mind about a long-held belief, a belief of enormous magnitude: I’m beginning to believe baseball managers matter.
###
Many of you are saying, well of course managers matter (or you’re saying, sheesh, another sports story? I’m outta here). But I’ve always believed managers had a minimal effect on a win-loss record. Take any intelligent baseball fan and side him up with a decent bench coach, and he could do a passable job managing. Write the lineup. Set your rotation. Change pitchers. Talk to the press. Lose arguments with umpires. Spit. Is that it?
I have no doubt I can perform that job with fewer embarrassing blunders than I would as, say, a plumber or biochemist or Federal Reserve chairman or software engineer or submarine sonar officer or sous chef or air traffic controller or ambassador to Norway* . Or, for that matter, football coach, where you need to not only know what Red-Z Omaha Split means, you have to create it, teach it, and decide when to employ it.
Many of you are saying, well of course managers matter (or you’re saying, sheesh, another sports story? I’m outta here). But I’ve always believed managers had a minimal effect on a win-loss record. Take any intelligent baseball fan and side him up with a decent bench coach, and he could do a passable job managing. Write the lineup. Set your rotation. Change pitchers. Talk to the press. Lose arguments with umpires. Spit. Is that it?
I have no doubt I can perform that job with fewer embarrassing blunders than I would as, say, a plumber or biochemist or Federal Reserve chairman or software engineer or submarine sonar officer or sous chef or air traffic controller or ambassador to Norway* . Or, for that matter, football coach, where you need to not only know what Red-Z Omaha Split means, you have to create it, teach it, and decide when to employ it.
* Sidenote: congratulations to the obscure Norwegian politicians who pick the Nobel Peace Prize winner - you didn't screw it up this year! As for the Swedes who give out the Literature prize, I'm still waiting for you to honor Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth or pretty much anybody with an American passport, but at least you didn't give it to a total obscurity this year.
In fact, I figured (and still do), it is harder to manage baseball in the minors and college where teaching the fundamentals is a big part of the job. I’m reasonably sure Phillies manager Charlie Manuel doesn’t have to tell Chase Utley how to pivot on a double play or Shane Victorino which cutoff man to hit or Ryan Howard to never ever EVER bunt.
And so, for years, I didn’t particularly care who managed my team. What I mostly hoped is he would be entertaining in interviews, like Bobby Valentine.
But here’s the thing: I’m watching these baseball playoffs and, except for the Yankees and Phillies – which are absolutely loaded with talent – I see a bunch of lineups and rotations that aren’t particularly impressive. And yet, these teams are in the playoffs, and my Mets are home again.
The Elements of Winning
I was recently in Minneapolis and had a chance to visit Target Field, the Twins’ new digs. I looked up at the Twins’ lineup and saw Joe Mauer and…well, a bunch of guys few people outside of Minnesota had ever heard of before. Michael Cuddyer has been on my fantasy teams a couple times, and is a pretty good hitter. But this is not an all star team. Justin Morneau missed most of the season with an injury, closer Joe Nathan hasn’t thrown a pitch since spring training. And yet here they were, in first place as usual.
And it got me to thinking about my team, the Mets, who have most of the elements of a winning team, but were once again muddling through a meaningless September:
Established stars
David Wright and Johan Santana are proven superstars. Carlos Beltran missed most of the season, but has been one of the premier centerfielders of his generation.
Up and coming players
Ike Davis had the second best rookie season by a hitter in Mets history. Mike Pelfrey broke through this year, pitching on an ace level most of the year. Jonathan Niese opened eyes all year long.
Unexpected performances from journeyman
In fact, I figured (and still do), it is harder to manage baseball in the minors and college where teaching the fundamentals is a big part of the job. I’m reasonably sure Phillies manager Charlie Manuel doesn’t have to tell Chase Utley how to pivot on a double play or Shane Victorino which cutoff man to hit or Ryan Howard to never ever EVER bunt.
And so, for years, I didn’t particularly care who managed my team. What I mostly hoped is he would be entertaining in interviews, like Bobby Valentine.
But here’s the thing: I’m watching these baseball playoffs and, except for the Yankees and Phillies – which are absolutely loaded with talent – I see a bunch of lineups and rotations that aren’t particularly impressive. And yet, these teams are in the playoffs, and my Mets are home again.
The Elements of Winning
I was recently in Minneapolis and had a chance to visit Target Field, the Twins’ new digs. I looked up at the Twins’ lineup and saw Joe Mauer and…well, a bunch of guys few people outside of Minnesota had ever heard of before. Michael Cuddyer has been on my fantasy teams a couple times, and is a pretty good hitter. But this is not an all star team. Justin Morneau missed most of the season with an injury, closer Joe Nathan hasn’t thrown a pitch since spring training. And yet here they were, in first place as usual.
And it got me to thinking about my team, the Mets, who have most of the elements of a winning team, but were once again muddling through a meaningless September:
Established stars
David Wright and Johan Santana are proven superstars. Carlos Beltran missed most of the season, but has been one of the premier centerfielders of his generation.
Up and coming players
Ike Davis had the second best rookie season by a hitter in Mets history. Mike Pelfrey broke through this year, pitching on an ace level most of the year. Jonathan Niese opened eyes all year long.
Unexpected performances from journeyman
Angel Pagan and R.A. Dickey? Did any journeyman hitter/pitcher combination have better unexpected seasons than these two?
Consistently good starting pitching
The Mets threw 19 shutouts this year. They had a team ERA of 3.73, a ¼ run better than the league average, and the 7th lowest in all of baseball.
A reliable bullpen
Francisco Rodriguez’s season ended in disgrace, and he had a few tough blown saves this year. But look closely and you’ll see that he had his best season since 2006, when he finished fourth in the Cy Young voting. His ERA was 2.20, he had a career low walks per nine innings, his WHIP was the second lowest of his career and he struck out an astonishing 3 batters for every one walked. A lot of Mets fan believe he struggled this year, and he had his patches – but those patches were surrounded by multiple weeks and even months of unhittable dominance.
Good baserunning
The Mets led the league in stolen bases. Again. In fact, the Mets have led the league in stolen bases every year since 2004, except for 2008 when they finished 2nd.
Established stars. Up and coming players. Unexpected performances from journeymen. Consistently good starting pitching. A good, occasionally great closer. Speed in the basepaths. The Mets took all of these elements and ended up…79-83.
Ron Gardenhire has been manager of the Minnesota Twins for nine years. In those nine years his team finished 1st six times. In eight of nine the Twins had a winning record. His only losing season was 2007 when they finished with the same mediocre record the Mets finished with this year, 79-83.
Mets manager Jerry Manuel has also managed nine seasons in the majors, with the White Sox and Mets. He had one first place finish. He’s had back to back 4th place finishes with the Mets. And he gives boring interviews.
The Mets just fired Jerry Manuel. Can someone else take this collection of promising talent and bring them to October? As the great Tug McGraw said, Ya Gotta Believe.
Consistently good starting pitching
The Mets threw 19 shutouts this year. They had a team ERA of 3.73, a ¼ run better than the league average, and the 7th lowest in all of baseball.
A reliable bullpen
Francisco Rodriguez’s season ended in disgrace, and he had a few tough blown saves this year. But look closely and you’ll see that he had his best season since 2006, when he finished fourth in the Cy Young voting. His ERA was 2.20, he had a career low walks per nine innings, his WHIP was the second lowest of his career and he struck out an astonishing 3 batters for every one walked. A lot of Mets fan believe he struggled this year, and he had his patches – but those patches were surrounded by multiple weeks and even months of unhittable dominance.
Good baserunning
The Mets led the league in stolen bases. Again. In fact, the Mets have led the league in stolen bases every year since 2004, except for 2008 when they finished 2nd.
Established stars. Up and coming players. Unexpected performances from journeymen. Consistently good starting pitching. A good, occasionally great closer. Speed in the basepaths. The Mets took all of these elements and ended up…79-83.
Ron Gardenhire has been manager of the Minnesota Twins for nine years. In those nine years his team finished 1st six times. In eight of nine the Twins had a winning record. His only losing season was 2007 when they finished with the same mediocre record the Mets finished with this year, 79-83.
Mets manager Jerry Manuel has also managed nine seasons in the majors, with the White Sox and Mets. He had one first place finish. He’s had back to back 4th place finishes with the Mets. And he gives boring interviews.
The Mets just fired Jerry Manuel. Can someone else take this collection of promising talent and bring them to October? As the great Tug McGraw said, Ya Gotta Believe.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Meadowlands Review
I went to Opening Day at the New Giants Stadium and wrote a review of it for the Giants fan site, Homer Jones. Part 1 is here.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Two Updates
1. In The Creative Urge, I talked about how nearly all children have the desire to create art - a desire that withers in adults. At one point I even wondered if the creative urge is, at some level, childish.
Well, I just stumbled upon a quote from Pablo Picasso which captures this beautifully. "The greatest artist in the world," he said, "is an uninhibited child at play." He also said "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist."
Both posts are updated.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
The Creative Urge
The director Tim Burton was on Charlie Rose recently talking about his art show at the Museum of Modern Art. The show is a collection of Burton’s drawings, doodles, and paintings over the years. Rose asked Burton if he started this at an early age:
"Well, like every kid, you know? I think most kids draw. I mean, the fascinating thing to me is by the time a lot of kids are ten years old, they say 'I can’t draw.' And that, to me, was always a very interesting signal about what society does to people. "
It seems kind of a simple observation but it stuck with me. Nearly every kid draws, doodles, colors, etch-a-sketches, paints. But they do more than make pictures. They write and perform dramas and comedies with improvised props and staging (play-acting). They sing and dance, sometimes to their own music and choreography (the school talent show). Heck, they even sculpt (Play-Doh or silly putty or sand castles).
Pablo Picasso made the same observation. "Every child is an artist," he said. "The problem is how to remain an artist." The creative urge, the desire to make art, exists in nearly all children. And then it dies.
Most adults are mere consumers of art. We watch movies and television. We listen to music. We read books. Even the more artistically inclined among us satisfy our urge by reading poetry or going to a museum or a play – but never, God forbid, actually painting a landscape or writing a song or performing a soliloquy from Hamlet.
Why is this? Or to frame it Burton’s way, what does society do to people that kills their creative urge?
Why do we put our crayons away?
A few theories come to mind. One is suggested by Burton when he says kids stop because they say, “I can’t draw”. Like Adam and Eve ashamed to realize they are naked, we get older and realize we aren’t particularly good artists, actors, or singers, and stop out of shame or embarrassment. One can debate whether Burton’s doodles are worthy of an exhibit at MoMA, but he’s clearly a talented man who has had a hugely successful career in the visual arts. Of course he didn’t stop.
Or maybe the less talented among us stop because it’s simply not fun – drawing a stick figure superhero flying through space (a specialty of mine as a child) is plenty of fun when you’re a kid, but the inadequacy of the drawing doesn’t cut it for an adult.
Or maybe we stop because we’re busy. One of the truly wonderful things about being 6 is that you have a lot of free time. When you’re 46, not so much.*
* I named this blog FreeTime because when I would occasionally write and share essays with people I’d often hear “You must have a lot of free time.” Nobody ever says that to people who go to the gym five days a week or watch television every night or play golf every Saturday. But write a blog and people wonder where you ever find the time for such a frivolous exercise.
Or maybe we stop because, to paraphrase Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, when we become adults we put childish things aside. Is there something about art that is childish? Picasso thought so. "The greatest artist in the world", he said, "is an uninhibited child at play."
There is something to all of these theories. But let me try out a new theory on you. Technology killed the creative urge - but it also has the potential to bring it back.
Creative Destruction
You don’t have to go back very far in human history – about a century or so – to discover a time when you couldn’t go to the movies or watch television or even play recorded music. Museums were few and far between – at least, fewer or farther between than now. Books were certainly available but there wasn’t a Barnes and Noble in every town or an Amazon on every desktop. Heck, you couldn’t even go down to Sears to buy a few paintings for your walls.
In the year 1900, if you wanted to be entertained by the arts, you damn near had to create it yourself. Okay, I exaggerate a bit. If you were wealthy individual in a major city you could go to the opera or see a play.
But creative entertainment in the 19th century consisted mostly of whatever you conjured up yourself. Sister Sarah played the piano. Uncle Bob sat around the fire telling stem-winding tales. Particularly educated families would learn and perform scenes from Shakespeare.
But now there is no need for any of that. With a press of the button we can hear Vladimir Horowitz - or Billy Joel - play the piano. I can turn on my television and watch world-renowned actors perform Shakespeare's plays - with special effects that would have astonished the Bard himself.
Technology obviated the need to create art because it brought the world's greatest art - or at least whatever form of art and entertainment we each prefer - to our doorstep. Don't believe me? Click here.
Technically Creative
But I'm starting to think, just maybe, technology could play a role in bringing back the creative urge.
Pablo Picasso made the same observation. "Every child is an artist," he said. "The problem is how to remain an artist." The creative urge, the desire to make art, exists in nearly all children. And then it dies.
Most adults are mere consumers of art. We watch movies and television. We listen to music. We read books. Even the more artistically inclined among us satisfy our urge by reading poetry or going to a museum or a play – but never, God forbid, actually painting a landscape or writing a song or performing a soliloquy from Hamlet.
Why is this? Or to frame it Burton’s way, what does society do to people that kills their creative urge?
Why do we put our crayons away?
A few theories come to mind. One is suggested by Burton when he says kids stop because they say, “I can’t draw”. Like Adam and Eve ashamed to realize they are naked, we get older and realize we aren’t particularly good artists, actors, or singers, and stop out of shame or embarrassment. One can debate whether Burton’s doodles are worthy of an exhibit at MoMA, but he’s clearly a talented man who has had a hugely successful career in the visual arts. Of course he didn’t stop.
Or maybe the less talented among us stop because it’s simply not fun – drawing a stick figure superhero flying through space (a specialty of mine as a child) is plenty of fun when you’re a kid, but the inadequacy of the drawing doesn’t cut it for an adult.
Or maybe we stop because we’re busy. One of the truly wonderful things about being 6 is that you have a lot of free time. When you’re 46, not so much.*
* I named this blog FreeTime because when I would occasionally write and share essays with people I’d often hear “You must have a lot of free time.” Nobody ever says that to people who go to the gym five days a week or watch television every night or play golf every Saturday. But write a blog and people wonder where you ever find the time for such a frivolous exercise.
Or maybe we stop because, to paraphrase Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, when we become adults we put childish things aside. Is there something about art that is childish? Picasso thought so. "The greatest artist in the world", he said, "is an uninhibited child at play."
There is something to all of these theories. But let me try out a new theory on you. Technology killed the creative urge - but it also has the potential to bring it back.
Creative Destruction
You don’t have to go back very far in human history – about a century or so – to discover a time when you couldn’t go to the movies or watch television or even play recorded music. Museums were few and far between – at least, fewer or farther between than now. Books were certainly available but there wasn’t a Barnes and Noble in every town or an Amazon on every desktop. Heck, you couldn’t even go down to Sears to buy a few paintings for your walls.
In the year 1900, if you wanted to be entertained by the arts, you damn near had to create it yourself. Okay, I exaggerate a bit. If you were wealthy individual in a major city you could go to the opera or see a play.
But creative entertainment in the 19th century consisted mostly of whatever you conjured up yourself. Sister Sarah played the piano. Uncle Bob sat around the fire telling stem-winding tales. Particularly educated families would learn and perform scenes from Shakespeare.
But now there is no need for any of that. With a press of the button we can hear Vladimir Horowitz - or Billy Joel - play the piano. I can turn on my television and watch world-renowned actors perform Shakespeare's plays - with special effects that would have astonished the Bard himself.
Technology obviated the need to create art because it brought the world's greatest art - or at least whatever form of art and entertainment we each prefer - to our doorstep. Don't believe me? Click here.
Technically Creative
But I'm starting to think, just maybe, technology could play a role in bringing back the creative urge.
Take this blog, for example. I don't consider FreeTime to be a blog in the way it is usually defined. I don't do an ongoing diary of my life, nor do I focus on any particular topic. In fact, I share very little about myself here.
For me, a "blog" (a word I despise) is merely a publishing platform; a way for me to easily engage in my favorite form of creativity - writing. Technology makes that possible.
In the past year I've watched my daughter discover the wonders of iMovie, Apple's remarkable video editing software. She is ten years old, and is filming and editing short videos with outstanding quality. Technology makes that possible.
Digital cameras and photo editing software have made photography - not just the snapping of pictures but the transformation and curation of those pictures - into something far more artistic than anything the previous generation knew. Technology makes that possible.
Even video games - yes, the dreaded video game, killer of children's minds - may play a larger role in the recovery of creativity. As my 13 year old son plays his assorted games I am aware that he is not simply watching - he is engaging in story scenarios in an interactive way that requires far more imagination than watching any old movie would require.
So take heart, Tim Burton. The curators at MoMA won't go rummaging through our drawers in order to show our doodles to the world's art elite. But maybe, just maybe, more and more of us will break out our digital crayons, and rediscover the artist within.
Monday, June 28, 2010
The Beautiful Game's Flaw
[This is the fifth in an unplanned series called The Volunteer Commissioner, in which I fix broken sports. In previous installments I singlehandedly fixed pick-up basketball, women’s softball, and men’s lacrosse. You’re welcome. Unfortunately, swimming is unfixable.]
Soccer, obviously, isn’t broken. According to ESPN, 147 zantillion people on 64 planets spread over 9 galaxies will watch every single minute of the 2010 World Cup. (And if they’re not watching in further galaxies, I’m sure they can hear those damn horns). Nothing this popular needs the help of the Volunteer Commissioner.
But that never stopped me before.
If you’re a fan of the beautiful game, you probably assume I’m an uncouth, red-necked, barbaric, gun-toting, beer-swilling, pot-bellied ugly American who wants higher scoring games because I'm aesthetically incapable of allowing a sport to slowly reveal its beauty. Well that’s not true. I don’t own a gun.
But my complaint is not the lack of scoring. That’s not to say I wouldn’t mind the occasional slugfest. I love a pitching duel in baseball, where two hurlers trade wits and skills for three hours backed by graceful and acrobatic fielders. But not every frickin’ game. Would it kill these guys to throw out a 6-5 score once in a while?
But still, I’ve learned to appreciate that a goal in soccer is special precisely because it is so hard to achieve.
And it’s not the officiating, though I wouldn’t mind if the officials explained what they’re calling once in a while. The disallowed goal in the U.S.-Slovenia game was so frustrating not just because of the injustice, but because nobody was charged with a crime. Habeas corpus, anyone?
And it’s not the overdramatic flops, though I find it ludicrous to see a player act like they’ve been chest-shot by a high-powered sniper rifle as they graze an opponent’s jersey. When the delightfully named Brazilian star Kaka received a red card for this, I felt the urge to don my Volunteer Commissioner cape.
But I decided that all sports have their own ethics*, and those ethics come from specific places in the sport. In football - I'm sorry, American football - a defensive back is considered wily and shrewd if he can grab a receiver’s shirt as long as he shields it from the referee. So what’s the difference?
* Golfers take great moral pride in the fact that they call penalties on themselves. But this is not because they are at their core more honorable people, but rather that in a sport played over many miles, self-policing is a must; the social mores of the sport grew out of its geography.
No, the flaw in the beautiful game is the ties. Through the first two weeks of the World Cup, nearly 1/3 of all games ended in a tie. The United States nearly advanced to the Sweet 16* without winning a single game. Their opponent in the knockout phase, Ghana, made it through their group without scoring a single non-penalty goal. Get a bunch of ties, and you’re in.
* Yeah, I know it’s not called the Sweet 16. I also am aware that the game is called football and that a 1-1 game is a draw, not a tie. You use your vernacular, I’ll use mine.
I’m willing to concede that there is something about American culture that makes the whole idea of a tie harder to accept. After all, the animating idea of communism and socialism (two philosophies that, like soccer, found more fertile ground in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa than they ever have in the U.S.) is to, as much as possible, create an economic draw among all its participants. Free market capitalism, on the other hand, is built on the idea of winning: if you reward society's strongest contributors, you create the incentive to perform at a high level, which benefits the entire society.
In fact, I think it was Adam Smith who coined the term "A tie is like kissing your sister". Karl Marx, meanwhile, posited that if the owners of the means of production had a 2-1 lead, the officials should allow the proletariats a penalty kick.
So what do we do about this problem? I know that shootouts aren’t the ideal solution, but if they are good enough to settle games in the far more important knock-out phase, why aren’t they good enough to settle them during Group Play? (I have no idea if I’m using the right terminology now…but work with me).
On the other hand, 147 zantillion people disagree with me, so maybe I should shut up.
Soccer, obviously, isn’t broken. According to ESPN, 147 zantillion people on 64 planets spread over 9 galaxies will watch every single minute of the 2010 World Cup. (And if they’re not watching in further galaxies, I’m sure they can hear those damn horns). Nothing this popular needs the help of the Volunteer Commissioner.
But that never stopped me before.
If you’re a fan of the beautiful game, you probably assume I’m an uncouth, red-necked, barbaric, gun-toting, beer-swilling, pot-bellied ugly American who wants higher scoring games because I'm aesthetically incapable of allowing a sport to slowly reveal its beauty. Well that’s not true. I don’t own a gun.
But my complaint is not the lack of scoring. That’s not to say I wouldn’t mind the occasional slugfest. I love a pitching duel in baseball, where two hurlers trade wits and skills for three hours backed by graceful and acrobatic fielders. But not every frickin’ game. Would it kill these guys to throw out a 6-5 score once in a while?
But still, I’ve learned to appreciate that a goal in soccer is special precisely because it is so hard to achieve.
And it’s not the officiating, though I wouldn’t mind if the officials explained what they’re calling once in a while. The disallowed goal in the U.S.-Slovenia game was so frustrating not just because of the injustice, but because nobody was charged with a crime. Habeas corpus, anyone?
And it’s not the overdramatic flops, though I find it ludicrous to see a player act like they’ve been chest-shot by a high-powered sniper rifle as they graze an opponent’s jersey. When the delightfully named Brazilian star Kaka received a red card for this, I felt the urge to don my Volunteer Commissioner cape.
But I decided that all sports have their own ethics*, and those ethics come from specific places in the sport. In football - I'm sorry, American football - a defensive back is considered wily and shrewd if he can grab a receiver’s shirt as long as he shields it from the referee. So what’s the difference?
* Golfers take great moral pride in the fact that they call penalties on themselves. But this is not because they are at their core more honorable people, but rather that in a sport played over many miles, self-policing is a must; the social mores of the sport grew out of its geography.
No, the flaw in the beautiful game is the ties. Through the first two weeks of the World Cup, nearly 1/3 of all games ended in a tie. The United States nearly advanced to the Sweet 16* without winning a single game. Their opponent in the knockout phase, Ghana, made it through their group without scoring a single non-penalty goal. Get a bunch of ties, and you’re in.
* Yeah, I know it’s not called the Sweet 16. I also am aware that the game is called football and that a 1-1 game is a draw, not a tie. You use your vernacular, I’ll use mine.
I’m willing to concede that there is something about American culture that makes the whole idea of a tie harder to accept. After all, the animating idea of communism and socialism (two philosophies that, like soccer, found more fertile ground in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa than they ever have in the U.S.) is to, as much as possible, create an economic draw among all its participants. Free market capitalism, on the other hand, is built on the idea of winning: if you reward society's strongest contributors, you create the incentive to perform at a high level, which benefits the entire society.
In fact, I think it was Adam Smith who coined the term "A tie is like kissing your sister". Karl Marx, meanwhile, posited that if the owners of the means of production had a 2-1 lead, the officials should allow the proletariats a penalty kick.
So what do we do about this problem? I know that shootouts aren’t the ideal solution, but if they are good enough to settle games in the far more important knock-out phase, why aren’t they good enough to settle them during Group Play? (I have no idea if I’m using the right terminology now…but work with me).
On the other hand, 147 zantillion people disagree with me, so maybe I should shut up.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Something Borrowed
I generally surf the web at lunch, and these two sports-related things both brought me pleasure:
1. A beautiful piece by the great Joe Posnanski about Armando Galarraga's "perfect" game: The Lesson of Jim Joyce
2. This link was sent by KMac in Chicago about Blackhawks fans getting on the bandwagon. I was in Chicago the week they won the Conference Finals (is that what they call it in hockey?) and the city was aflame with Hawk Love. Even the Art Institute had huge Blackhawks banners hanging out front. Anyway, a fun video about fans jumping on the bandwagon:
1. A beautiful piece by the great Joe Posnanski about Armando Galarraga's "perfect" game: The Lesson of Jim Joyce
2. This link was sent by KMac in Chicago about Blackhawks fans getting on the bandwagon. I was in Chicago the week they won the Conference Finals (is that what they call it in hockey?) and the city was aflame with Hawk Love. Even the Art Institute had huge Blackhawks banners hanging out front. Anyway, a fun video about fans jumping on the bandwagon:
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
The Slowest Game?
" Don't Shoot!"Lacrosse bills itself as “the fastest game on two feet”. But if fans of hurling (“the fastest game on grass”), hockey (“the fastest game on ice”), and jai-alai (“the fastest game on earth”) tuned in to yesterday’s NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Final, they can be forgiven for scoffing at this notion. Because the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame slowed the game down so much it could have been sponsored by Sherwin-Williams and called the “Watching Paint Dry” Lacrosse Final.
* All of these sports base their “fastest” claims on the speed of the ball or puck, but none are faster than a badminton shuttlecock, which can travel as fast as 206 mph.
Okay, I’m being unfair. On many levels it was a very exciting game. Notre Dame and Duke traded goals in the game’s opening minutes and the score was close or tied the entire game. A sudden death OT lasted only five seconds, thanks to a thrilling faceoff-scoop-run-and-score by longstick middie C.J. Costabile. And in a sport that has been dominated by a quintet of teams (Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, Virginia, Princeton, and North Carolina have won every title since 1978) the appearance in the Final of two teams who had never won a title is a great thing for the sport.
But still…lacrosse is the fastest growing sport in America (that claim might actually be true) and many people tuned in to ESPN yesterday to see this exciting sport they have heard so much about. Sadly, they were treated to a game that, as announcer Sean McDonough said, looked like a North Carolina Tar Heel basketball game before the shot clock.
Credit Notre Dame for the right strategy, which we’ll dub the Irish Famine. Coach Kevin Corrigan, realizing he had the least talented team in the tournament, slowed the pace of the game down to a crawl, starving the Duke offense of the ball. On nearly every possession, his offense was content to pass the ball around and bleed the clock. They were given multiple stall warnings and half their shots seemed designed to miss, so that instead of turning the ball over their X attackman can race to the back line and reclaim possession. (for lacrosse newbies, when a shot goes out of bounds, possession goes to whatever team gets to the out of bounds spot first)
The result: a 6-5 decision, the lowest scoring title game in NCAA history. And while Notre Dame goalie Scott Rodgers was as good as advertised, let’s not pretend that this game was about defense. This game was about Notre Dame playing keepaway, holding the ball for huge chunks of time doing nothing but playing catch. Duke features the best attack in the country, but Ned Crotty (63 assists this season), Max Quinzani (68 goals) and Zach Howell (51 goals) spent most of the game standing and staring at the other end of the field.
In a showcase moment for the sport, with its popularity at an all-time high and the first finals team from West of the Mississippi, it delivered a snoozer.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger (and if the Irish has the ball, I don’t have to worry about that)
This is not meant as a critique of the sport in general. I played a little lacrosse myself back in the day (with an emphasis on the word “little”). I sat at the end of the bench for a Long Island high school in the early 80’s, and found my way to the middle of the bench (3rd and 4th midfield line) for a Fairfield University club team that dominated New England club lacrosse in the late 80’s.
* I graduated in 88, and from 87 to 89 the Stags went 33-2. In ’93 they went Division I and today are good enough that earlier this year they beat one of the teams in yesterday’s final.
I picked up the game late and wasn’t very good – I scored 3 goals in my entire college “career” - but I loved the sport and still do. Today, lacrosse is wildly popular where I live in Rockland County. My 10 year-old daughter plays, as do all five of my Rockland nephews. My two brothers-in-law coach their sons, and a buddy announces high school lacrosse on MSG.
Lacrosse is a genuinely great sport – one that offers the ideal combination of speed, athleticism, toughness, knowledge and grace. But one has to ask: how many coaches across the country watched a mediocre Notre Dame team – one that was unseeded and went 10-7 on the year – get to within one goal of a title, and think, hmmm? Maybe I’ll slow down my offense next year…
And that would be a terrible thing for the sport.
The Fix
Luckily, FreeTime is here to propose a solution – to fix the problem before it manifests itself. You already know what it is, don’t you? You knew it as soon as you saw the basketball shot clock reference above. It was once said that the only man who could stop Michael Jordan was his own coach at North Carolina, Dean Smith. And basketball as a sport does not benefit if the rules can stop Michael Jordan.
Well, we don’t want to stop Ned Crotty, Max Quinzani and Zach Howell either. The NCAA – the only governing body of the sport that matters – should institute a shot clock immediately. I’ll leave the details up to smarter laxheads than me, but there’s no need to be too aggressive right away. I’m leaning towards two minutes but even three might be fine.
But you also need an intent rule. In other words, you can’t have guys launch shots 10 feet over the goal just to reset the clock.
The sport is at a key moment in its growth. Don’t let the Irish Famine slow it down. Literally.
(Hat Tip to the Rock Star, who suggested this post and served as research assistant.)
[This is the fourth in an unplanned series called The Volunteer Commissioner in which I helpfully point out the flaws in various sports and suggest fixes. Previous installments were The Losers Out Manifesto, Swimming is Boring, and Fixing Softball. And before World Cup fever has passed, look for a piece on soccer.]
Friday, May 14, 2010
King James Redux
In late March I wrote a piece called The Duper Level in which I argued that Lebron James needed the Big Apple to launch himself from mere Superstar to Super Duper Star (The Duper Level). At the end I speculated about how this year's post-season could affect his decision:
"I think the results of this year's playoffs could impact his decision. If, for example, the Cavs choke in the postseason, he may feel he needs to stay and win a title for Ohio. And good for him if he does. But if he wins a ring for Cleveland, and does so over Utah in a 6-game series that gets lower ratings than Conan O'Brien, he just might want to hear what those folks in the Garden have to say."
But here's the thing: when I said "choke in the post-season", I meant an upset in the Finals, not a 6-game ass-whupping in the Conference semi-finals*, one that included multiple blow-outs and the entire world calling into question whether Lebron is the second coming of Karl Malone or Patrick Ewing rather than the Second Coming of the Lord.
* It's May 14th, and the 2009-2010 seasons of Lebron James, Sidney Crosby, and Alexander Ovechkin are over, further proof that making sports predictions is for fools and con men.
This unexpected development could play into the Knicks hands. Here's the Sports Guy:
"See, there was only one way LeBron was leaving Cleveland this summer: if the team fell apart so badly and indefensibly before the Finals that he could get talked into a 'You just need a fresh start with a new team' case. He couldn't leave if they lost in the Finals to Kobe's Lakers; he'd look like a coward. He couldn't leave if they won the title; no great player leaves a defending champ at the altar -- it's never happened before. But if it plays out like this? He could leave. Absolutely. It's conceivable."
Now Bill Simmons knows more about the NBA than all of us combined, but he also predicted* the Celtics would lose in the first round and the Mavericks would go to the Finals. So who knows?
* Simmons is neither a fool or a con man, but makes more wrong predictions per week than most people make in a year. But hey, ssports passion makes us foolish.
I’d like to add one other thing into the mix. Here is what Kevin Garnett told reporters about his conversation with Lebon after the game:
"If I could go back and do my situation over, knowing what I know now with this organization, I'd have done it a little sooner. Loyalty is something that hurts you at times because you can't get youth back."
KG, of course, spent his prime in Minnesota getting booted out of the first round, then came to Boston and won a title. Now, I’m only a world-class superstar athlete in my dreams, so I don’t know about these things. But I bet that the words of Kevin Garnett – somebody who has walked in Lebron James’ high-tops - have more impact than those of agents, sneaker company executives, sports writers, and maybe even the members of your entourage. And what Kevin is saying is, “Get out!!!”
Who knows? Maybe he’ll end up with the Bulls. Maybe in his own heart he needs to stay in Cleveland. I’m not foolish enough to make a prediction.
But the futures market on Knicks season tickets just went up.
"I think the results of this year's playoffs could impact his decision. If, for example, the Cavs choke in the postseason, he may feel he needs to stay and win a title for Ohio. And good for him if he does. But if he wins a ring for Cleveland, and does so over Utah in a 6-game series that gets lower ratings than Conan O'Brien, he just might want to hear what those folks in the Garden have to say."
But here's the thing: when I said "choke in the post-season", I meant an upset in the Finals, not a 6-game ass-whupping in the Conference semi-finals*, one that included multiple blow-outs and the entire world calling into question whether Lebron is the second coming of Karl Malone or Patrick Ewing rather than the Second Coming of the Lord.
* It's May 14th, and the 2009-2010 seasons of Lebron James, Sidney Crosby, and Alexander Ovechkin are over, further proof that making sports predictions is for fools and con men.
This unexpected development could play into the Knicks hands. Here's the Sports Guy:
"See, there was only one way LeBron was leaving Cleveland this summer: if the team fell apart so badly and indefensibly before the Finals that he could get talked into a 'You just need a fresh start with a new team' case. He couldn't leave if they lost in the Finals to Kobe's Lakers; he'd look like a coward. He couldn't leave if they won the title; no great player leaves a defending champ at the altar -- it's never happened before. But if it plays out like this? He could leave. Absolutely. It's conceivable."
Now Bill Simmons knows more about the NBA than all of us combined, but he also predicted* the Celtics would lose in the first round and the Mavericks would go to the Finals. So who knows?
* Simmons is neither a fool or a con man, but makes more wrong predictions per week than most people make in a year. But hey, ssports passion makes us foolish.
I’d like to add one other thing into the mix. Here is what Kevin Garnett told reporters about his conversation with Lebon after the game:
"If I could go back and do my situation over, knowing what I know now with this organization, I'd have done it a little sooner. Loyalty is something that hurts you at times because you can't get youth back."
KG, of course, spent his prime in Minnesota getting booted out of the first round, then came to Boston and won a title. Now, I’m only a world-class superstar athlete in my dreams, so I don’t know about these things. But I bet that the words of Kevin Garnett – somebody who has walked in Lebron James’ high-tops - have more impact than those of agents, sneaker company executives, sports writers, and maybe even the members of your entourage. And what Kevin is saying is, “Get out!!!”
Who knows? Maybe he’ll end up with the Bulls. Maybe in his own heart he needs to stay in Cleveland. I’m not foolish enough to make a prediction.
But the futures market on Knicks season tickets just went up.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Old Buck and the Justice
How 1850s Presidents are like 21st Century Supreme Court Justices
When James Buchanan was elected President in 1856, his previous twelve years of job experience looked like this:
1845 – 1849: Secretary of State
1849 – 1853: Did not hold public office
1853 – 1856: Ambassador to England
Why is this interesting? Because in 1856 the political issues roiling America were entirely domestic. The fiery debates over slavery, which had sparked after the Mexican War in 1848 and would explode into Civil War in 1861, were burning brightly in 1856. And so the American people elected a man who…had lived in England the previous four years? A man who had not held a job connected to domestic politics in 12 years? A man who had expressed few public opinions on the major issues of his day?
And remember, when Old Buck was Ambassador (then called Minister to the Court of St. James), it’s not like he was zipping back and forth to Washington on the Concorde, reading the New York Times online, watching CNN over satellite, or exchanging emails via Blackberry with his friends in the Senate. Despite receiving numerous and eloquent letters from informed friends, he lived a life – and held a job – that was largely removed from the domestic political scenes.
So how did he become President? Well, as software engineers like to say, his remoteness from domestic politics wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. You see, since Buchanan didn’t have to win Senate elections or make domestic policy or vote on laws during this bumptious time, he didn’t have to express his opinion very often on the critical issues of the day. Which made him a bit of a blank slate – and being a blank slate was a good thing if you were running for President in the decade before the Civil War. His two predecessors – Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce – were similar blank slates. Both were former generals whose politics were a bit of a mystery – sort of the Dwight Eisenhower and Colin Powell of their day.
Blank slates were good because the political fevers ran so hot in the 1850’s that politicians found it difficult to hem and haw and dart and dodge and bob and weave; they had to commit to positions– for or against the expansion of slavery – that made them unpalatable as a candidate for national office.
Indeed, in 1860 the country would elect as President an inexperienced politician who was on record as strongly opposing slavery. The South’s response was secession, followed by a civil war that killed 600,000 Americans.
1845 – 1849: Secretary of State
1849 – 1853: Did not hold public office
1853 – 1856: Ambassador to England
Why is this interesting? Because in 1856 the political issues roiling America were entirely domestic. The fiery debates over slavery, which had sparked after the Mexican War in 1848 and would explode into Civil War in 1861, were burning brightly in 1856. And so the American people elected a man who…had lived in England the previous four years? A man who had not held a job connected to domestic politics in 12 years? A man who had expressed few public opinions on the major issues of his day?
And remember, when Old Buck was Ambassador (then called Minister to the Court of St. James), it’s not like he was zipping back and forth to Washington on the Concorde, reading the New York Times online, watching CNN over satellite, or exchanging emails via Blackberry with his friends in the Senate. Despite receiving numerous and eloquent letters from informed friends, he lived a life – and held a job – that was largely removed from the domestic political scenes.
So how did he become President? Well, as software engineers like to say, his remoteness from domestic politics wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. You see, since Buchanan didn’t have to win Senate elections or make domestic policy or vote on laws during this bumptious time, he didn’t have to express his opinion very often on the critical issues of the day. Which made him a bit of a blank slate – and being a blank slate was a good thing if you were running for President in the decade before the Civil War. His two predecessors – Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce – were similar blank slates. Both were former generals whose politics were a bit of a mystery – sort of the Dwight Eisenhower and Colin Powell of their day.
Blank slates were good because the political fevers ran so hot in the 1850’s that politicians found it difficult to hem and haw and dart and dodge and bob and weave; they had to commit to positions– for or against the expansion of slavery – that made them unpalatable as a candidate for national office.
Indeed, in 1860 the country would elect as President an inexperienced politician who was on record as strongly opposing slavery. The South’s response was secession, followed by a civil war that killed 600,000 Americans.
The Blankest Slate
Why do I bring this all up? Because, from what I can tell, there isn’t a person on earth who truly knows what Elena Kagan believes about a single important issue of our times. As Dahlia Lithwick, the liberal court-watcher at Slate put it “Kagan has mastered the fine art of nearly perfect ideological inscrutability.”
How big a mystery is Kagan? Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, met Elena Kagan at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on the Supreme Court and has known her both personally and professionally for 27 years – and he doesn’t know what her views are. Here’s Toobin:
Judgment, values, and politics are what matters on the Court. And here I am somewhat at a loss. Clearly, she’s a Democrat. She was a highly regarded member of the White House staff during the Clinton years, but her own views were and are something of a mystery. She has written relatively little, and nothing of great consequence.
Her academic writings reveal little. Her decision to bar ROTC recruiters from Harvard Law School’s campus* isn’t as big a deal as the right will make it out to be (the full story is here; the short story is she mostly kept in place a reasonable compromise she inherited). She seems to believe in shareholder rights and executive power. But really – nobody knows.
* a word about the ROTC thing. Many colleges banned military recruiters from their campuses due to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; they considered it a discriminatory law and therefore barred the “employer”, in this case the United States Military, from recruiting. Putting aside for the moment that the military consists of men and women who are willing to die for our country, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” wasn’t Pentagon policy; it was a law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic President, Bill Clinton. They should have barred them from campus.
This level of inscrutability has been de rigueur for Supreme Court appointees since the destruction of Robert Bork in 1987. Presidents want Justices who won’t be destroyed by the opposition and the easiest way to do that is to nominate someone with an impressive resume and a nonexistent paper trail.
But Kagan’s nomination takes it to a new level because she’s never even been a judge before. Judges generally have to rule on things and reveal a little about how they think about things. No such luck with Kagan.
Now I have no problem with non-judges ascending to the highest court in the land. The very first Chief Justice, John Jay, had no judicial experience, and the most consequential Chief Justice since World War II, Earl Warren, donned his first robes when he joined the court. But these were men deeply involved in the hurly-burly of politics - not academic cloisters like Kagan.
Elena Kagan is, by every account, a deeply intelligent and accomplished woman. And given her background from the Upper West Side, through the Ivy League and the Clinton White House, back to Harvard and ultimately in the Obama Administration - nobody will be surprised if she’s a true liberal.
But Presidents have been surprised before at the judicial picks. The aforementioned Eisenhower called his selection of the aforementioned Warren as the “biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made”. And Ike is the guy who let Monty launch Market Garden.
As for Elena Kagan, I guess we’ll find out. It just may take a few decades.
How big a mystery is Kagan? Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, met Elena Kagan at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on the Supreme Court and has known her both personally and professionally for 27 years – and he doesn’t know what her views are. Here’s Toobin:
Judgment, values, and politics are what matters on the Court. And here I am somewhat at a loss. Clearly, she’s a Democrat. She was a highly regarded member of the White House staff during the Clinton years, but her own views were and are something of a mystery. She has written relatively little, and nothing of great consequence.
Her academic writings reveal little. Her decision to bar ROTC recruiters from Harvard Law School’s campus* isn’t as big a deal as the right will make it out to be (the full story is here; the short story is she mostly kept in place a reasonable compromise she inherited). She seems to believe in shareholder rights and executive power. But really – nobody knows.
* a word about the ROTC thing. Many colleges banned military recruiters from their campuses due to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; they considered it a discriminatory law and therefore barred the “employer”, in this case the United States Military, from recruiting. Putting aside for the moment that the military consists of men and women who are willing to die for our country, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” wasn’t Pentagon policy; it was a law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic President, Bill Clinton. They should have barred them from campus.
This level of inscrutability has been de rigueur for Supreme Court appointees since the destruction of Robert Bork in 1987. Presidents want Justices who won’t be destroyed by the opposition and the easiest way to do that is to nominate someone with an impressive resume and a nonexistent paper trail.
But Kagan’s nomination takes it to a new level because she’s never even been a judge before. Judges generally have to rule on things and reveal a little about how they think about things. No such luck with Kagan.
Now I have no problem with non-judges ascending to the highest court in the land. The very first Chief Justice, John Jay, had no judicial experience, and the most consequential Chief Justice since World War II, Earl Warren, donned his first robes when he joined the court. But these were men deeply involved in the hurly-burly of politics - not academic cloisters like Kagan.
Elena Kagan is, by every account, a deeply intelligent and accomplished woman. And given her background from the Upper West Side, through the Ivy League and the Clinton White House, back to Harvard and ultimately in the Obama Administration - nobody will be surprised if she’s a true liberal.
But Presidents have been surprised before at the judicial picks. The aforementioned Eisenhower called his selection of the aforementioned Warren as the “biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made”. And Ike is the guy who let Monty launch Market Garden.
As for Elena Kagan, I guess we’ll find out. It just may take a few decades.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
The Lost Ending
I am a Lost fan. In response to that statement you probably have one of three reactions. They are:
a) Who cares?
b) You poor sap. You’ve given six years of your life to that narrative nightmare?
c) Me too! How do you think it will end?!
I am not a hard-core Lostie. I don’t post on fan sites or download podcasts, and even though I blog I’ve never mentioned it in the 130 posts I’ve written since 2007.
But still, I’ve been there from day 1. I watched the pilot on September 22, 2004 and have seen every single episode since, nearly always with Mrs. Keatang, a fellow Lostie. We swap theories afterwards, read some of the fan site stuff the next day, hit pause during the show to clarify a point or take a closer look at something (“Wait! Did that shark have a Dharma Initiative tattoo? Hit rewind.”)
Put me in a room with a fellow Lostie and we’ll begin swapping theories about the Candidates, the Numbers, The Smoke Monster and whether or not Jacob and/or Widmore are on the side of good or evil. We’ll wonder what happened to Walt, speculate about the nature of the characters’ names, and marvel at the amazing hygiene of our island-bound heroes.
In other words, even though I’m a fairly casual fan I’ve engaged with the show in a way that I never have with any other television show. My personal arc with Lost has gone something like this:
Season 1: Tremendously entertaining television –one of the genuinely great accomplishments in the history of the medium.
Season 2: Very, very intriguing…old questions are being answered as new ones are asked.
Season 3: More questions…but I’m losing interest in the answers. Is Fonzie about to jump the Dharma Initiative shark?
Season 4/5: Okay, I’m still watching but only because they announced they’ll have everything wrapped up by Season 6 and I’ve come this far. Enjoying it but doing the television equivalent of looking at my watch waiting for it to end.
Beginning of Season 6: WTF is going on?! Lost?! Damn right I’m lost! I hate this show!!!
Middle of Season 6: Hmmmm….the hook is back in. The battle of good vs. evil is heading towards some sort of conclusion. But who is good? And who is evil?
End of Season 6: Well, we’re about to find out, won’t we?
And that’s the interesting part, isn’t it? Has any fictional endeavor ever had so much at stake with its ending?
It is one of the great truths of writing fiction – and I use the term broadly to include novels, short stories, movies and television shows – that endings are the hardest part.
In some genre fiction – particularly the detective novel - the entire point of the exercise is the ending. The butler did it. And television episodes of a certain kind of show are also about the ending. The butler's DNA proves he did it.
But in television series, the ending is rarely the point. Hugely popular shows like M*A*S*H had big finales, and people cared about the ending, but the ending was never the point. Even shows with long narrative arcs aren’t designed to head toward some sort of climax, since the creators never know when it is going to end.
An interesting parallel is The Sopranos. Like Lost, The Sopranos ran for six seasons. Like Lost it had devoted fans and strong ratings (The Sopranos had fewer viewers than Lost, but its ratings were more impressive because it was on pay cable).
The Sopranos finale was a huge cultural event, and millions of Americans believed they had an emotional investment in the finale. And it’s fair to say that most were disappointed and many were enraged. A Journey song playing while the family sits in a diner? No big showdown with the New York gangsters? No answers to unresolved plot lines like the Russian in the woods? No resolution or climax to anything, at all? Even viewers who appreciated what Sopranos auteur David Chase was doing couldn’t help but feel let down.
But Lost has even more at stake. The whole point of the show has been questions and answers, mysteries and puzzles. No Lost viewer in his right mind expects resolution to every puzzle, but we want a satisfying climax, we want an epiphany, we want nothing less than a big a-ha moment that we'll talk about for years after. We want a return on our emotional investment. If we don’t get one, we’ll feel cheated out of the hours of viewing time we’ve dedicated to the show.
This is arguably an unfair proposition. The very fact that the writers have created this level of desire among millions of intelligent viewers* is a feat unto itself.
* Yes, us Losties are more intelligent than the rabble watching The Biggest Loser
But that’s the situation. I wish them luck. I really really wish them luck.
Sidebar: Desert Island Albums
Lost is not without humor, thanks mostly to Hurley and Sawyer, but it is without banter. The inhabitants of the island never just sit around shooting the shit. How great would it have been if they hired Nick Hornby to write an episode where the main characters talk about their desert island albums? It would have been funny, insightful, maybe even created some more puzzles.
With that in mind, I thought I’d share with you my desert island album list. Of course, you need rules for this sort of thing and here are mine: Greatest Hits albums, live albums, and compilations with a unifying theme (covers of an artist, for example) are acceptable, but box collections are not. If you don’t like those rules, write your own damn blog.
Also, please note that these are not my idea of "The Greatest Albums of All Time", or even my personal favorite albums, necessarily. Just the ones I'll need if my plane ever splits in half due to a seismic event over an uncharted island. They are in no particular order, and with apologies to REM, Bruce, The Rolling Stones, Elvis, Johnny Cash, and many others...
Astral Weeks, Van Morrison
Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan
Legend, Bob Marley
One More From the Road, Lynyrd Skynyrd
London Calling, The Clash
The Last Waltz, The Band
The Christmas Album, Nat King Cole
Making Movies, Dire Straits
Original Musiquarium, Stevie Wonder
Oil Change, Drive Shaft
August and Everything After, Counting Crows
Hard Promises, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Revolver, Beatles
a) Who cares?
b) You poor sap. You’ve given six years of your life to that narrative nightmare?
c) Me too! How do you think it will end?!
I am not a hard-core Lostie. I don’t post on fan sites or download podcasts, and even though I blog I’ve never mentioned it in the 130 posts I’ve written since 2007.
But still, I’ve been there from day 1. I watched the pilot on September 22, 2004 and have seen every single episode since, nearly always with Mrs. Keatang, a fellow Lostie. We swap theories afterwards, read some of the fan site stuff the next day, hit pause during the show to clarify a point or take a closer look at something (“Wait! Did that shark have a Dharma Initiative tattoo? Hit rewind.”)
Put me in a room with a fellow Lostie and we’ll begin swapping theories about the Candidates, the Numbers, The Smoke Monster and whether or not Jacob and/or Widmore are on the side of good or evil. We’ll wonder what happened to Walt, speculate about the nature of the characters’ names, and marvel at the amazing hygiene of our island-bound heroes.
In other words, even though I’m a fairly casual fan I’ve engaged with the show in a way that I never have with any other television show. My personal arc with Lost has gone something like this:
Season 1: Tremendously entertaining television –one of the genuinely great accomplishments in the history of the medium.
Season 2: Very, very intriguing…old questions are being answered as new ones are asked.
Season 3: More questions…but I’m losing interest in the answers. Is Fonzie about to jump the Dharma Initiative shark?
Season 4/5: Okay, I’m still watching but only because they announced they’ll have everything wrapped up by Season 6 and I’ve come this far. Enjoying it but doing the television equivalent of looking at my watch waiting for it to end.
Beginning of Season 6: WTF is going on?! Lost?! Damn right I’m lost! I hate this show!!!
Middle of Season 6: Hmmmm….the hook is back in. The battle of good vs. evil is heading towards some sort of conclusion. But who is good? And who is evil?
End of Season 6: Well, we’re about to find out, won’t we?
And that’s the interesting part, isn’t it? Has any fictional endeavor ever had so much at stake with its ending?
It is one of the great truths of writing fiction – and I use the term broadly to include novels, short stories, movies and television shows – that endings are the hardest part.
In some genre fiction – particularly the detective novel - the entire point of the exercise is the ending. The butler did it. And television episodes of a certain kind of show are also about the ending. The butler's DNA proves he did it.
But in television series, the ending is rarely the point. Hugely popular shows like M*A*S*H had big finales, and people cared about the ending, but the ending was never the point. Even shows with long narrative arcs aren’t designed to head toward some sort of climax, since the creators never know when it is going to end.
An interesting parallel is The Sopranos. Like Lost, The Sopranos ran for six seasons. Like Lost it had devoted fans and strong ratings (The Sopranos had fewer viewers than Lost, but its ratings were more impressive because it was on pay cable).
The Sopranos finale was a huge cultural event, and millions of Americans believed they had an emotional investment in the finale. And it’s fair to say that most were disappointed and many were enraged. A Journey song playing while the family sits in a diner? No big showdown with the New York gangsters? No answers to unresolved plot lines like the Russian in the woods? No resolution or climax to anything, at all? Even viewers who appreciated what Sopranos auteur David Chase was doing couldn’t help but feel let down.
But Lost has even more at stake. The whole point of the show has been questions and answers, mysteries and puzzles. No Lost viewer in his right mind expects resolution to every puzzle, but we want a satisfying climax, we want an epiphany, we want nothing less than a big a-ha moment that we'll talk about for years after. We want a return on our emotional investment. If we don’t get one, we’ll feel cheated out of the hours of viewing time we’ve dedicated to the show.
This is arguably an unfair proposition. The very fact that the writers have created this level of desire among millions of intelligent viewers* is a feat unto itself.
* Yes, us Losties are more intelligent than the rabble watching The Biggest Loser
But that’s the situation. I wish them luck. I really really wish them luck.
Sidebar: Desert Island Albums
Lost is not without humor, thanks mostly to Hurley and Sawyer, but it is without banter. The inhabitants of the island never just sit around shooting the shit. How great would it have been if they hired Nick Hornby to write an episode where the main characters talk about their desert island albums? It would have been funny, insightful, maybe even created some more puzzles.
With that in mind, I thought I’d share with you my desert island album list. Of course, you need rules for this sort of thing and here are mine: Greatest Hits albums, live albums, and compilations with a unifying theme (covers of an artist, for example) are acceptable, but box collections are not. If you don’t like those rules, write your own damn blog.
Also, please note that these are not my idea of "The Greatest Albums of All Time", or even my personal favorite albums, necessarily. Just the ones I'll need if my plane ever splits in half due to a seismic event over an uncharted island. They are in no particular order, and with apologies to REM, Bruce, The Rolling Stones, Elvis, Johnny Cash, and many others...
Astral Weeks, Van Morrison
Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan
Legend, Bob Marley
One More From the Road, Lynyrd Skynyrd
London Calling, The Clash
The Last Waltz, The Band
The Christmas Album, Nat King Cole
Making Movies, Dire Straits
Original Musiquarium, Stevie Wonder
Oil Change, Drive Shaft
August and Everything After, Counting Crows
Hard Promises, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Revolver, Beatles
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Healthy Enough
As I’ve said before, I often feel like a moderate in a land of extremists. I know that’s not actually true – there are many more moderates than extremists, but moderates don’t shout quite as loudly or get quite as passionate about things as extremists, so we tend to leave the stage to them.
My moderation extends towards many things. To politics, where the discussion is dominated by partisans and the rest of us are collateral damage. To religion, where worshipers of all faiths, including atheists*, have a certitude I lack. Even to culture – where I am decidedly middle brow in my music and literary tastes.
* Does it ever occur to Angry Atheists that they have a lot in common with the religious folks they attack? They too are absolutely 100% certain about something they cannot prove
One area my moderation extends is health. No, I’m not talking about national healthcare– I avoided that debate here at FreeTime. I’m talking about my health. You know, exercise and nutrition and vices like drinking and smoking, and all of those things that add up (hopefully) to good health. In that area I have a very simple two-word philosophy: Healthy Enough.
The Extremists
We are, of course surrounded by health nuts. Several women in my town, most on the far side of 40, are so committed to their intense gym regimens that they could show up at Marine boot camp tomorrow and impress the hell out of the drill sergeants. We also all know people whose diets wouldn’t satisfy the hunger of small woodlands creatures. And of course the crime of smoking is deemed by society to be on a par with beating up elderly nuns.
(Thankfully, nearly everyone drinks. The Health Police took away our cigarettes and are now trying to legislate our eating habits; but when they come for our beer and booze we’ll drown them in Tofu.)
We are also, of course, surrounded by people whose personal health – how do I put this - does not seem their primary concern. Now I am a firm believer that obesity charts are ridiculous – if 221 pounds for a 6’0” man is obese, then I’m only a few KFC Double Downs away from Fatsoville. But it’s clear there are far too many Americans that should work the occasional salad into their diet.
But my philosophy, as stated, is Healthy Enough. I am not trying out for the Olympic swim team, have little cause to ever run 26 miles, and was in my last fist fight in 1986 (that's a good story for another day).
So why beat myself up in the gym 4 days a week? More importantly, why deny myself the special pleasure of what my friend Gombo calls the occasional cone.* Or the occasional cigar with an Irish whiskey? Or the occasional entire bag of Cheez Doodles while watching Seinfeld reruns.
* Gombo is an ascetic fellow, not out of some ridiculous desire to be super healthy, but just because he has plain tastes. He doesn’t want dressing on his salad, toppings on his ice cream, or fashionably placed rips in his jeans. I asked him once if he ever has dessert and he answered, “Oh, I have the occasional cone.” A couple years ago he had a potentially life-threatening health scare and I wrote a eulogy for him entitled “The Occasional Cone”. It was a damned good eulogy. Too bad he survived.
But while I don’t treat my body as a temple, I try not to treat it like a baby treats a diaper, either. I play a little Sunday hoops, keep my tobacco intake limited to the occasional cigar, and seriously, I only did that Cheez Doodles thing the one time.
By pursuing my Healthy Enough philosophy, I hope to live a reasonably long life while enjoying all the pleasures that vices offer. Of course, my health will be seriously threatened if those women in my town read this and take offense. Because seriously – they can beat the crap out of me.
My moderation extends towards many things. To politics, where the discussion is dominated by partisans and the rest of us are collateral damage. To religion, where worshipers of all faiths, including atheists*, have a certitude I lack. Even to culture – where I am decidedly middle brow in my music and literary tastes.
* Does it ever occur to Angry Atheists that they have a lot in common with the religious folks they attack? They too are absolutely 100% certain about something they cannot prove
One area my moderation extends is health. No, I’m not talking about national healthcare– I avoided that debate here at FreeTime. I’m talking about my health. You know, exercise and nutrition and vices like drinking and smoking, and all of those things that add up (hopefully) to good health. In that area I have a very simple two-word philosophy: Healthy Enough.
The Extremists
We are, of course surrounded by health nuts. Several women in my town, most on the far side of 40, are so committed to their intense gym regimens that they could show up at Marine boot camp tomorrow and impress the hell out of the drill sergeants. We also all know people whose diets wouldn’t satisfy the hunger of small woodlands creatures. And of course the crime of smoking is deemed by society to be on a par with beating up elderly nuns.
(Thankfully, nearly everyone drinks. The Health Police took away our cigarettes and are now trying to legislate our eating habits; but when they come for our beer and booze we’ll drown them in Tofu.)
We are also, of course, surrounded by people whose personal health – how do I put this - does not seem their primary concern. Now I am a firm believer that obesity charts are ridiculous – if 221 pounds for a 6’0” man is obese, then I’m only a few KFC Double Downs away from Fatsoville. But it’s clear there are far too many Americans that should work the occasional salad into their diet.
But my philosophy, as stated, is Healthy Enough. I am not trying out for the Olympic swim team, have little cause to ever run 26 miles, and was in my last fist fight in 1986 (that's a good story for another day).
So why beat myself up in the gym 4 days a week? More importantly, why deny myself the special pleasure of what my friend Gombo calls the occasional cone.* Or the occasional cigar with an Irish whiskey? Or the occasional entire bag of Cheez Doodles while watching Seinfeld reruns.
* Gombo is an ascetic fellow, not out of some ridiculous desire to be super healthy, but just because he has plain tastes. He doesn’t want dressing on his salad, toppings on his ice cream, or fashionably placed rips in his jeans. I asked him once if he ever has dessert and he answered, “Oh, I have the occasional cone.” A couple years ago he had a potentially life-threatening health scare and I wrote a eulogy for him entitled “The Occasional Cone”. It was a damned good eulogy. Too bad he survived.
But while I don’t treat my body as a temple, I try not to treat it like a baby treats a diaper, either. I play a little Sunday hoops, keep my tobacco intake limited to the occasional cigar, and seriously, I only did that Cheez Doodles thing the one time.
By pursuing my Healthy Enough philosophy, I hope to live a reasonably long life while enjoying all the pleasures that vices offer. Of course, my health will be seriously threatened if those women in my town read this and take offense. Because seriously – they can beat the crap out of me.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Opening Eve
The United States government is going bankrupt, unemployment remains at 10%, and the NBC series Chuck* is at risk of being cancelled. But as far as I’m concerned, all is right with the world because, ladies and gentlemen, baseball is back!
* Seriously, I have completely fallen for Chuck. I’m mildly embarrassed by this; should I be?
So as I bask in the glow of the Mets' ritual Opening Day victory (32-9 on ODs since the 69 Miracle Mets), I thought I’d share a few thoughts with you.
Naming the Day
These days its unclear which day actually is Opening Day. Was it Sunday night when the New York Billionaires lost to the Boston Multi-Millionaires? Or Monday, when the other 30 teams get their mojo on? Well, here at FreeTime, we don’t complain, we propose solutions.
Let me start by saying I have no problem with change and innovation. Folks who sit around growling that the Cincinnati Reds should kick off every season at Noon on Monday because “Dadgum it, that’s how we did it when I was a boy” are trapped in a time warp. They should stick to the New York Times sports section and their lineup of octogenarian columnists who think 1950’s New York baseball should be frozen in amber and replayed over and over and leave modern baseball to the rest of us.
That said the Sunday night game has caused a bit of a linguistic problem. Monday is the true Opening Day, with 15 games played across the continent, grown men scheming to leave work early, with sunshine and American flags and hot dogs and rookie debuts and “recording artists”* you’ve never heard of singing the National Anthem.
* That would be a good name for a band, The Recording Artists. “And now, to sing the National Anthem, Columbia recording artists, The Recording Artists!”
Where was I? Right, our linguistic problem. Some have proposed we call Sunday night Opening Night, but c’mon, this isn’t theater. This is Baseball with a Capital B. Opening Day is a holiday, not a show making its debut and hoping not to be cancelled. (Okay, it was cancelled in 1994. But that was different).
We are all very comfortable with the concept of Eves. December 24 is Christmas Eve, December 25 is Christmas Day. December 31 is New Year’s Eve; January 1 we nurse our hangover and watch East Illinois State play Acorn University in the Fremulon Insurance Who Gives a Crap Bowl. Why not do the same thing for Opening Day?
From here on, Sunday Night is Opening Eve and Monday is Opening Day. My will be done. Now let’s move on to other, more pressing issues.
Sympathy for the Devil
And what a wonderful Opening Eve! The New York Stormtroopers blew a 4-run lead with their best pitcher on the mound. The Yankees are in last place!
But of course they won’t stay there. How glorious it must be to be a Yankee fan. To root for a team that finishes in 1st place nearly ever season, a team that plays in October nearly every season. A team for whom Opening Eve really is like Christmas Eve, because Daddy George has bought us the most expensive toys in the off-season.
To root for a team that has won 1/3 of all the Championships since the Hoover Administration. Think about that.
There are some 120 teams in the 4 major sports in North America. Throw in the major college football and basketball teams and we’re talking almost 200 teams with serious rooting interests.
But none of them has a sustained record of winning like the New York Yankees, not even close. The Lakers you say? Please. Ruth, Mantle and Company had 20 rings before the Lakers even moved to California. North Carolina basketball? Yanks had more titles during Clinton’s second term than the Tar Heels have racked up since Dean Smith’s first season.
But there is a dark side to all this winning. A basic human truth is that when something is hard it is more rewarding. Reading Shakespeare, drinking single-malt scotch and running a marathon are significantly harder than reading James Patterson, drinking Coors Light and watching a sitcom while eating an entire bag of Cheetos. But the rewards are far greater.
Being a sports fan offers the same rewards. Sports teams are supposed to follow some natural arc – promise, disappointment, dejection, promise again, heartbreaking loss – and then, occasionally, a championship! The sweetness of that title is accentuated by the depth of the despair.
Ask a New York Rangers fan about the 1994 Stanley Cup and you’ll hear a game-by-game breakdown of the entire playoff run. Ask a Yankee fan who they beat in the 1999 World Series and you’ll get, quite often, a thoughtful frown followed by an answer with a question mark. “The Braves? No, that was ninety, um, six. Wait, okay, Braves were 96, then 98 was the 114 wins and they beat the Pa-a-a-a-dres…and of course 2000 was the Mets! Maybe it was the Braves again. I dunno. Doesn’t matter.”
It’s like being a drug addict. The high is awesome at first, but eventually it loses its power to excite. In fact, for some portion of Yankee Nation last year’s title was like a junkie’s relief at the moment the needle goes in.
So today, my friends, as the Yankees defend yet another title, I ask for just a little sympathy.
Hope Springs Eternal
Oh, who am I kidding? It must be awesome to be a Yankee fan.
My team, the New York Metropolitans, is in one of those deep, jagged valleys that teams not named the Yankees occasionally find themselves. In 2006 they ran away with the NL East and had a lead late in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. But then, well, if you’re still reading this you know what happened next. Stunning collapses in 07 and 08, and an avalanche of injuries in 2009.
But it’s April and every fan from Kansas City to Seattle and everywhere in between should be filled with hope. Here’s my quickie case for Mets hope: And yes, I know that if ifs and buts were candy and nuts every day would be Christmas. And my case for Metsie Hope is drowning in ifs and buts. But dadgum it, it’s Opening Day!
- If Jose Reyes comes back (as expected) and Carlos Beltran comes back (who knows?), the foursome of Reyes/Wright/Beltran/Bay is pretty fearsome. Throw in a bit of Francouer power, Castillo’s .390 OBP and 20 steals, and you’re gonna score some runs.
- Only five closers have strung together 5 consecutive 35-save seasons. Two of them are over 40. K-Rod is one of the other three. He’s as close to a sure thing you get this side of the Bronx.
- Yes, the starting rotation is filled with question marks, but question marks are better than negative answers, no? John Maine, Oliver Perez and Mike Pelfrey have all proved they can pitch on the major league level, and all are young enough to have strong seasons in them. Last year was rough and spring training worse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if any of these guys won 15 games with a low 4 ERA.
And if not, it'll be easier to get good seats at CitiField this year!
Carthago delendo est
Allow me to repeat a rant from last year, a point I plan on remaking in all future baseball pieces moving forward.
"Maybe I'm a little OCD, but it drives me crazy that the AL West has 4 teams, the NL Central has 6, and the other four divisions have 5 teams. Isn't that unfair? Everything else being equal, an AL West team has a 25% chance of winning the division, whereas an NL Central team has a - um, hold on, let me get my calculator - shoot, I dunno, a 17% chance. Something like that. And it's not like this is a hard problem to fix. You simply take the Brewers, who used to be in the AL anyway, and move 'em to the AL West. Voila! Six teams with 5 divisions each! Why don't they do that? Oh wait, I remember..."
* Seriously, I have completely fallen for Chuck. I’m mildly embarrassed by this; should I be?
So as I bask in the glow of the Mets' ritual Opening Day victory (32-9 on ODs since the 69 Miracle Mets), I thought I’d share a few thoughts with you.
Naming the Day
These days its unclear which day actually is Opening Day. Was it Sunday night when the New York Billionaires lost to the Boston Multi-Millionaires? Or Monday, when the other 30 teams get their mojo on? Well, here at FreeTime, we don’t complain, we propose solutions.
Let me start by saying I have no problem with change and innovation. Folks who sit around growling that the Cincinnati Reds should kick off every season at Noon on Monday because “Dadgum it, that’s how we did it when I was a boy” are trapped in a time warp. They should stick to the New York Times sports section and their lineup of octogenarian columnists who think 1950’s New York baseball should be frozen in amber and replayed over and over and leave modern baseball to the rest of us.
That said the Sunday night game has caused a bit of a linguistic problem. Monday is the true Opening Day, with 15 games played across the continent, grown men scheming to leave work early, with sunshine and American flags and hot dogs and rookie debuts and “recording artists”* you’ve never heard of singing the National Anthem.
* That would be a good name for a band, The Recording Artists. “And now, to sing the National Anthem, Columbia recording artists, The Recording Artists!”
Where was I? Right, our linguistic problem. Some have proposed we call Sunday night Opening Night, but c’mon, this isn’t theater. This is Baseball with a Capital B. Opening Day is a holiday, not a show making its debut and hoping not to be cancelled. (Okay, it was cancelled in 1994. But that was different).
We are all very comfortable with the concept of Eves. December 24 is Christmas Eve, December 25 is Christmas Day. December 31 is New Year’s Eve; January 1 we nurse our hangover and watch East Illinois State play Acorn University in the Fremulon Insurance Who Gives a Crap Bowl. Why not do the same thing for Opening Day?
From here on, Sunday Night is Opening Eve and Monday is Opening Day. My will be done. Now let’s move on to other, more pressing issues.
Sympathy for the Devil
And what a wonderful Opening Eve! The New York Stormtroopers blew a 4-run lead with their best pitcher on the mound. The Yankees are in last place!
But of course they won’t stay there. How glorious it must be to be a Yankee fan. To root for a team that finishes in 1st place nearly ever season, a team that plays in October nearly every season. A team for whom Opening Eve really is like Christmas Eve, because Daddy George has bought us the most expensive toys in the off-season.
To root for a team that has won 1/3 of all the Championships since the Hoover Administration. Think about that.
There are some 120 teams in the 4 major sports in North America. Throw in the major college football and basketball teams and we’re talking almost 200 teams with serious rooting interests.
But none of them has a sustained record of winning like the New York Yankees, not even close. The Lakers you say? Please. Ruth, Mantle and Company had 20 rings before the Lakers even moved to California. North Carolina basketball? Yanks had more titles during Clinton’s second term than the Tar Heels have racked up since Dean Smith’s first season.
But there is a dark side to all this winning. A basic human truth is that when something is hard it is more rewarding. Reading Shakespeare, drinking single-malt scotch and running a marathon are significantly harder than reading James Patterson, drinking Coors Light and watching a sitcom while eating an entire bag of Cheetos. But the rewards are far greater.
Being a sports fan offers the same rewards. Sports teams are supposed to follow some natural arc – promise, disappointment, dejection, promise again, heartbreaking loss – and then, occasionally, a championship! The sweetness of that title is accentuated by the depth of the despair.
Ask a New York Rangers fan about the 1994 Stanley Cup and you’ll hear a game-by-game breakdown of the entire playoff run. Ask a Yankee fan who they beat in the 1999 World Series and you’ll get, quite often, a thoughtful frown followed by an answer with a question mark. “The Braves? No, that was ninety, um, six. Wait, okay, Braves were 96, then 98 was the 114 wins and they beat the Pa-a-a-a-dres…and of course 2000 was the Mets! Maybe it was the Braves again. I dunno. Doesn’t matter.”
It’s like being a drug addict. The high is awesome at first, but eventually it loses its power to excite. In fact, for some portion of Yankee Nation last year’s title was like a junkie’s relief at the moment the needle goes in.
So today, my friends, as the Yankees defend yet another title, I ask for just a little sympathy.
Hope Springs Eternal
Oh, who am I kidding? It must be awesome to be a Yankee fan.
My team, the New York Metropolitans, is in one of those deep, jagged valleys that teams not named the Yankees occasionally find themselves. In 2006 they ran away with the NL East and had a lead late in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. But then, well, if you’re still reading this you know what happened next. Stunning collapses in 07 and 08, and an avalanche of injuries in 2009.
But it’s April and every fan from Kansas City to Seattle and everywhere in between should be filled with hope. Here’s my quickie case for Mets hope: And yes, I know that if ifs and buts were candy and nuts every day would be Christmas. And my case for Metsie Hope is drowning in ifs and buts. But dadgum it, it’s Opening Day!
- If Jose Reyes comes back (as expected) and Carlos Beltran comes back (who knows?), the foursome of Reyes/Wright/Beltran/Bay is pretty fearsome. Throw in a bit of Francouer power, Castillo’s .390 OBP and 20 steals, and you’re gonna score some runs.
- Only five closers have strung together 5 consecutive 35-save seasons. Two of them are over 40. K-Rod is one of the other three. He’s as close to a sure thing you get this side of the Bronx.
- Yes, the starting rotation is filled with question marks, but question marks are better than negative answers, no? John Maine, Oliver Perez and Mike Pelfrey have all proved they can pitch on the major league level, and all are young enough to have strong seasons in them. Last year was rough and spring training worse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if any of these guys won 15 games with a low 4 ERA.
And if not, it'll be easier to get good seats at CitiField this year!
Carthago delendo est
Allow me to repeat a rant from last year, a point I plan on remaking in all future baseball pieces moving forward.
"Maybe I'm a little OCD, but it drives me crazy that the AL West has 4 teams, the NL Central has 6, and the other four divisions have 5 teams. Isn't that unfair? Everything else being equal, an AL West team has a 25% chance of winning the division, whereas an NL Central team has a - um, hold on, let me get my calculator - shoot, I dunno, a 17% chance. Something like that. And it's not like this is a hard problem to fix. You simply take the Brewers, who used to be in the AL anyway, and move 'em to the AL West. Voila! Six teams with 5 divisions each! Why don't they do that? Oh wait, I remember..."
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The Duper Level
I suggested that Lebron James will be tempted by the Big Apple and make his way to the New York Knicks. They dismissed this as typical New York arrogance, and clearly believed that Madison Square Garden harbored snakes as evil as any in the Garden of Eden.
Like all good sports arguments this one got me thinking, and I thought I would helpfully share my thinking with Knicks management as they prepare to make their case to Lebron. They all fall under the broad argument of achieving what we'll call the Duper Level. In other words, there is no doubt Lebron is already a superstar, but if he wants to be a Super Duper Star, he's got to come to New York. Here are a few ways of thinking about The Duper Level.
The Lucille Test
One way to look at whether or not an athlete has achieved the Duper Level is the Lucille Test. Lucille is my Mom, and she is aware of sports but not what you'd call a passionate fan. And I just had the following conversation with her:
Me: Do you know who Lebron James is?
Mom: Who?
Me: Lebron James.
Mom: Legron?
Me: Lebron. With a B.
Mom: Lebon James...wait, I know that name. He's some kind of sports player. I know this because I just read it somewhere. He plays sports.
Me: Do you know what sport?
Mom: (pause). Football?
Now, my Mom knows Tiger Woods (and not because of recent scandals). She knows Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning and Kobe Bryant and Brett Favre, and back in the 90's she knew Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. But if Lebron James walked into her kitchen right now and said "Hi, I'm Lebron James and I play for the Cleveland Cavaliers", she'd have no idea what the hell he was talking about.
There are Lucilles all over this great land of ours and across the globe and part of achieving the Duper Level means having the Lucilles know who you are. Play in New York, and I assure you, you'll pass the Lucille Test.
Stern's Nightmare
There's a pretty good chance we'll see a rematch of Kobe vs. Lebron in the NBA Finals. But it's not unlikely we'll see Denver-Cleveland, or even worse, Utah-Cleveland. David Stern's nightmare is wasting the greatness of Lebron James on a Utah-Cleveland series. That thing might get Stanley Cup ratings.
But Lebron in New York? A Knicks-Whomever Finals? This could return the NBA to its glory days. And what is good for the NBA is good for Lebron - yet another step on the way to the Duper Level.
The Jeter Parallel
Another way of thinking about this is to remember my old friend Derek Jeter. Now Derek Jeter is a fine ball player, but he's no Mickey Mantle. He has won no MVPs, no batting titles, no home run titles. And yet, he is a Super Duper Star while clearly superior players like Albert Pujols couldn't pass the Lucille Test if you spotted her the Albert and the Pujo.
And why has he achieved the Duper Level? Because 15 years ago a Yankee team that did everything well went on a 5-year run, and he was arguably the best player on that team. Amazing what winning titles in New York will do for you.
What is Lebron Thinking?
Of course none of this matters if Lebron wants to stay in Cleveland. He's a hometown boy, can make a higher salary in Cleveland than anywhere else, and already has national endorsement deals. One could forgive him for thinking he is quite Duper enough already, thank you very much, regardless of what Lucille thinks.
And of course you don't have to play in New York to go Duper. Peyton Manning plays in the tiny little town of Indianapolis, population 784,118, where until recently the NFL was the fourth most popular sport behind college hoops, auto racing, and cow-tipping. Brooklyn has neighborhoods bigger than that. At rush hour, the 7 train holds more people than that. And yet Peyton is as Duper as you get.
But the NBA has lost some of its power to create stars. Random fun fact: the two worst-selling newstand issues that Sports Illustrated and ESPN Magazine had in 2009 were ones featuring Dwight Howard on the cover. The NBA does not have the star-making power it once had.
That said, I think the results of this year's playoffs could impact his decision. If, for example, the Cavs choke in the postseason, he may feel he needs to stay and win a title for Ohio. And good for him if he does.
But if he wins a ring for Cleveland, and does so over Utah in a 6-game series that gets lower ratings than Conan O'Brien, he just might want to hear what those folks in the Garden have to say.
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Curious Popularity of March Madness
In the past I’ve been a bit of a bully, picking on lesser sports like swimming and softball. But today I’m going to take on one of our most popular sporting events, college basketball.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally get the appeal of March Madness. I watched the last ten minutes of Northern Iowa-Kansas and was captivated by every possession. I watched in wonderment yesterday as an Ivy League school, the 12 seed Cornell, completely dismantled a Big Ten team, the 4 seed Wisconsin. And I too felt the pain of watching my brackets crumble as Villanova and Kansas fell.
During my sophomore and junior years, I experienced the joy of watching my small school, Fairfield University, make the tournament (FU has only made the tourney three times in its history and I was lucky to be a student for two of them). Further, I’ve been to a Final Four weekend – North Carolina’s victory over Illinois in 2006 - and count it among my greatest experiences as a sports fan.
So I’m not here to knock college basketball exactly. Rather I’m here to wonder aloud how a sport that has so many potentially fatal flaws is so damned popular. Here is my list of why college basketball should suck:
+ Sixty Five teams make the postseason. Isn’t this ridiculous? Most professional sports leagues only have 30 teams or so, and fewer than half make the postseason. Baseball purists complain about wild cards because – gasp! –8 whole teams play in October. But in men’s basketball the tournament is the post-season and sixty–five frickin’ teams make it (and another half-dozen believe they got jobbed). This creates two problems for the casual fan. One, who can possibly track all these teams and still have cranium space for less important subjects like healthcare legislation or your children’s middle names. And two, it kinda sorta renders the entire “regular season” a joke – doesn’t it?
+ Roster Turnover. Even if you did have the time and energy to track so many teams, or even half of them, remember that all of these teams have 100% roster turnover at least every four years and the better players don't last that long. Carmelo Anthony, the best player to win a college championship the past 25 years, did it at as a freshman. We’d barely learned his name and he was gone from the sport. Imagine how much better this sport would be if we got to see Carmelo wearing orange for four years?
+ Mediocre Stars. Final Four weekends of yore featured future NBA legends on a regular basis. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, Hakeem Olajuwon, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Patrick Ewing, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson – they all played and excelled in the Final Four and most of them won a title and the Most Outstanding Player award. But the great players of today either skip college entirely (Lebron, Kobe, Garnett, Dwight Howard), pass through so quickly you don’t notice them (Steve Nash, Chris Bosh), can’t get their team out of the Sweet 16 (Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan), or come from abroad (Dirk Nowitzki, Yao Ming). Which leaves us watching a collection of mediocre players who will end up in Europe, coaching, or at the end of the Knicks bench. (For more detail, see my piece Heaven without Stars).
+ Unfair Matchups. In most sports, there is some sort of governing authority that sets the schedule and creates a level playing field. But in college sports there are multiple conferences that set a conference schedule, thus freeing up schools to set the rest of their schedule to their liking. The result is that the strong schools get to make the rules. If Fairfield wants to play North Carolina, North Carolina will say sure – in our building on the day we decide with ACC refs. And if you don’t like it, tough. That’s not very sporting, is it?
Can you imagine any other sport with these flaws? College football doesn’t – most college football players stay for four years, the conference schedule comprises most of the games, and only a handful of bowl positions really matter. Imagine the NBA with 300 teams, 65 in the post-season, all Laker-Clippers games at the Staples Center and LeBron already retired.
But you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Or maybe those very flaws are the game’s strengths. Who are these guys from Northern Iowa and Cornell? Is Kentucky as vulnerable as Kansas? Will Syracuse redeem the Big East? These questions, because of their newness, are much more interesting, or at least different, than wondering again if Brett Favre is returning, or watching Jeter and the Yankees making their 47th playoff run, or seeing Shaq win another ring with another talented teammate.
Besides, I’ve got Kentucky winning it all, so my sheet ain’t dead yet!
Don’t get me wrong. I totally get the appeal of March Madness. I watched the last ten minutes of Northern Iowa-Kansas and was captivated by every possession. I watched in wonderment yesterday as an Ivy League school, the 12 seed Cornell, completely dismantled a Big Ten team, the 4 seed Wisconsin. And I too felt the pain of watching my brackets crumble as Villanova and Kansas fell.
During my sophomore and junior years, I experienced the joy of watching my small school, Fairfield University, make the tournament (FU has only made the tourney three times in its history and I was lucky to be a student for two of them). Further, I’ve been to a Final Four weekend – North Carolina’s victory over Illinois in 2006 - and count it among my greatest experiences as a sports fan.
So I’m not here to knock college basketball exactly. Rather I’m here to wonder aloud how a sport that has so many potentially fatal flaws is so damned popular. Here is my list of why college basketball should suck:
+ Sixty Five teams make the postseason. Isn’t this ridiculous? Most professional sports leagues only have 30 teams or so, and fewer than half make the postseason. Baseball purists complain about wild cards because – gasp! –8 whole teams play in October. But in men’s basketball the tournament is the post-season and sixty–five frickin’ teams make it (and another half-dozen believe they got jobbed). This creates two problems for the casual fan. One, who can possibly track all these teams and still have cranium space for less important subjects like healthcare legislation or your children’s middle names. And two, it kinda sorta renders the entire “regular season” a joke – doesn’t it?
+ Roster Turnover. Even if you did have the time and energy to track so many teams, or even half of them, remember that all of these teams have 100% roster turnover at least every four years and the better players don't last that long. Carmelo Anthony, the best player to win a college championship the past 25 years, did it at as a freshman. We’d barely learned his name and he was gone from the sport. Imagine how much better this sport would be if we got to see Carmelo wearing orange for four years?
+ Mediocre Stars. Final Four weekends of yore featured future NBA legends on a regular basis. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, Hakeem Olajuwon, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Patrick Ewing, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Oscar Robertson – they all played and excelled in the Final Four and most of them won a title and the Most Outstanding Player award. But the great players of today either skip college entirely (Lebron, Kobe, Garnett, Dwight Howard), pass through so quickly you don’t notice them (Steve Nash, Chris Bosh), can’t get their team out of the Sweet 16 (Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan), or come from abroad (Dirk Nowitzki, Yao Ming). Which leaves us watching a collection of mediocre players who will end up in Europe, coaching, or at the end of the Knicks bench. (For more detail, see my piece Heaven without Stars).
+ Unfair Matchups. In most sports, there is some sort of governing authority that sets the schedule and creates a level playing field. But in college sports there are multiple conferences that set a conference schedule, thus freeing up schools to set the rest of their schedule to their liking. The result is that the strong schools get to make the rules. If Fairfield wants to play North Carolina, North Carolina will say sure – in our building on the day we decide with ACC refs. And if you don’t like it, tough. That’s not very sporting, is it?
Can you imagine any other sport with these flaws? College football doesn’t – most college football players stay for four years, the conference schedule comprises most of the games, and only a handful of bowl positions really matter. Imagine the NBA with 300 teams, 65 in the post-season, all Laker-Clippers games at the Staples Center and LeBron already retired.
But you know what? It just doesn’t matter. Or maybe those very flaws are the game’s strengths. Who are these guys from Northern Iowa and Cornell? Is Kentucky as vulnerable as Kansas? Will Syracuse redeem the Big East? These questions, because of their newness, are much more interesting, or at least different, than wondering again if Brett Favre is returning, or watching Jeter and the Yankees making their 47th playoff run, or seeing Shaq win another ring with another talented teammate.
Besides, I’ve got Kentucky winning it all, so my sheet ain’t dead yet!
Friday, March 12, 2010
The Enduring Attraction of the Civil War
I recently watched Gods and Generals, a 2003 Civil War movie based on the novel by Jeff Shaara. It attempts, in the span of 3 hours and 45 minutes, to cover the two years of fighting in Northern Virginia between April 1861 and April 1863.
It is an impossible task and the filmmakers fail. Impossible because those two years include First Bull Run, Second Bull Run, The Valley campaign, the 7 Days battle, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. These are some of the largest, most important battles in American history. And oh, by the way, these two years saw some of the most momentous political events in American history, like the election of Abraham Lincoln, secession, and the Emancipation Proclamation.
Maybe – maybe – you can capture the sweep of this period with a long miniseries, a la Band of Brothers*. But it is impossible in a theatrically-released film, even one as interminably long as Gods and Generals, to cover the period without unforgivable omissions. For example, the filmmakers simply pretend that George McClellan, the most important Union general of the period, and the battles he was in, simply didn’t exist.
* The mini-series is a highly underrated art form. In fact, two of my favorite “movies” of all time, Band of Brothers and Lonesome Dove, are miniseries. Miniseries are the only way to fully present a book on screen in all its richness. Also, to be fair, the filmmakers behind Gods & Generals also made Gettysburg, a fine Civil War film.
But still…I watched the whole damn thing. Yeah, some of it was painful, particularly the scenes that had, you know, dialogue. (in fact, some of the worst dialogue is uttered by Stonewall Jackson, played by the fine actor Stephen Lang, who you probably saw as Colonel Quaritch in a little flick called Avatar.)
But the battle scenes –it’s impossible to take your eyes away from the battle scenes, particularly if you’ve ever been captivated by the Civil War. The first clash at Bull Run. The Northern waves rolling up Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. And most compellingly, the Confederates under Robert Rodes stealthily emerging from the woods to hit O.O. Howard’s troops at Chancellorsville, the high mark of the Confederacy.
The Civil War is the American Iliad, and seeing these scenes brought to life as realistically as it’s ever been done is extraordinary. And it’s a reminder of the enduring attraction of the Civil War.
A Dramatic Climax
Ken Burns, the brilliant documentarian who made The Civil War and many other extraordinary documentaries about America, recounted a conversation he had with Shelby Foote, the historian who became an unlikely star in Burns’ masterpiece. Burns mentioned that he had never been to Ford’s Theater, the site of Lincoln’s assassination, because he found the idea of being there too emotionally painful.
Foote exclaimed, “But Lincoln’s assassination was the best part of the Civil War!” (Or something to that effect; I’m going from memory on the quote).
Burns was shocked. He knew Foote to be a great admirer of Lincoln; in fact Foote believed Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest* to be the two authentic geniuses produced by The Civil War.
* Forrest is a fascinating individual, in many ways the epitome of the best and worst of America. He was a poor man who made a fortune, but the fortune was made at least in part as a slave trader. He was a brilliant, self-taught cavalry commander; a born genius on the battlefield, he was the only individual to enlist as a private and finish the war as a lieutenant general. He was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, but in 1875 gave a speech that recommended what was, for the time, an enlightened and radically aggressive agenda of equality for black Americans. The curious contradictory nature of Forrest made him a touchstone for many writers, notably Faulkner. Today he is mostly known as the guy who gave Mr. Gump his first name. It must pain the ghost of N.B. Forrest, one of the most aggressive military leaders in American history, that his name is most famously associated with the expression “Run, Forrest, run!!”
But Burns slowly realized what Foote meant. Shelby Foote was a novelist by training and a historian by accident. And as a novelist the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – days after Appomattox but before the final surrender of the South – was a dramatic climax to the story of the Civil War, a perfect finish to a beautifully constructed plot. (Burns, on the other hand, is the classic sensitive artist type, hence his reluctance to enter Ford’s).
That story stayed with me, and the more I thought about it the more I realized that Americans’ enduring interest in the Civil War can be partly explained by the unusually dramatic arc of the war. In fact, it all plays out rather nicely as a 3-act play.
Act I
The first act centers on the run-up to and start of the war.
It can start in many places – as early as the first slaves arriving in Virginia, or the compromises built into the Constitution, or the end of the Mexican War, which added new states to the Union and new controversy over whether those states would be free or not.
But I’d start it on May 22, 1856, when South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks beat Massachussets Senator Charles Sumner with a wooden cane on the floor of the Senate, in response to an anti-slavery speech made Sumner three days earlier. The beating was so savage that Sumner couldn’t return to the Senate for 3 years. *
* And people get worked up about Joe Wilson – also of South Carolina - shouting “You Lie!” during President Obama’s healthcare speech, or Rahm Emmanuel's bullying. Anyone who thinks Washington DC used to be more civil should get thee to a library.
From there we’d follow the story through Bleeding Kansas, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln’s election, Secession, and the Fort Sumter crisis. We’d be introduced to characters who’d become important later – like Robert E. Lee, a colonel in the United States Army, who ends John Brown’s siege of Harper’s Ferry.
Act I ends with the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War.
Act II
The story of Act II is the story of the underdog Confederacy. They are outnumbered, out gunned, out-allied, out-everything – and yet they win battle after battle. Robert E. Lee is the star of Act II, and a succession of bumbling Union generals provide the pathos and the comedy. But others rise too – the flamboyant Confederate cavalryman Jeb Stuart, an eloquent but unsure Abraham Lincoln learning his job, and just offstage, a stoic Union general named U.S. Grant providing foreshadowing out West.
Act II has no shortage of political drama, as Lincoln balances the demands of Radical Republicans who want abolition and Copperhead Democrats who want to let the South go. He demonstrates his political shrewdness through the timing and military justification for the Emancipation Proclamation.
Act II ends with the Southern invasion of Pennsylvania and the dramatic victory by the Union at Gettysburg, coupled with Grant’s victory at Vicksburg. With the end of the act, the tide has turned.
Act III
Here’s where Foote’s observation about Ford’s Theater comes into play. Act III would be a fairly boring act – a grinding series of battles between Lee and Grant leading to the inevitable Union victory. There is no drama and little poetry during the brutal final 9 months of the war. Then – pow! – John Wilkes Booth, who fittingly happens to be an accomplished dramatic actor*, kills Lincoln, leaps onto the stage and runs out of the theater. A despicable act, but as Foote says, from a dramatic standpoint the highlight of the war, and the one that destined Lincoln for the pantheon.
* Again...people who think actors and their political views are annoying now should recall the past...
Of course a great play requires more than just compelling characters and a well-structured plot. It needs dialogue, and boy does the CW deliver dialogue. Quotes from Lincoln alone fill books, but many other quotes from "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" to "War is hell" derive from the War Between the States.
One can argue, certainly, that the American Revolution is a more important war. The Revolution created America, whereas the Civil War merely maintained it. And we have been, since at least 1994's Saving Private Ryan, obsessed with the Second World War.
But the Civil War endures, and I suspect it will for a long time. The walls of Troy were stormed some 3000 years ago (or maybe not; who knows?) and many of us are still familiar with the feats of Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus.
Will the same be true of the American Civil War? I suspect so, and like the Iliad, it will be in part because of its dramatic structure.
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